Dedicated to spreading the Good News of Basic and Applied Science at great research institutions world wide. Good science is a collaborative process. The rule here: Science Never Sleeps.
Prof. Dr.
Katja Poppenhäger
Science contact
Phone: +49 331 7499 521
kpoppenhaeger@aip.de
Dr. Cecilia Garraffo
Science contact
cgarraffo@cfa.harvard.edu
Sarah Hönig
Media contact
Phone: +49 331 7499 803
presse@aip.de
Artist’s illustration of a star-planet-system. The stellar wind around the star and the effect on the planet’s atmosphere is visible. Credit: K. Riebe/ J. Fohlmeister/ AIP.
Employing state-of-the-art numerical simulations, a study led by scientists at the Leibniz Institute for Astrophysics Potsdam (AIP) has obtained the first systematic characterization of the properties of stellar winds in a sample of cool stars. They found that stars with stronger magnetic fields produce more powerful winds. These winds create unfavourable conditions for the survival of planetary atmospheres, thus affecting the possible habitability of these systems.
The Sun is among the most abundant stars in the universe known as “cool stars”. These stars are divided into four categories (F, G, K, and M-type) that differ in size, temperature, and brightness. The Sun is a fairly average star and it belongs to category G. Stars brighter and larger than the Sun are in category F, while K stars are slightly smaller and cooler than the Sun. The smallest and faintest stars are the M stars, also known as “red dwarfs” due to the colour in which they emit most of their light.
Satellite observations have revealed that apart from light, the Sun emits a persistent stream of particles known as the “solar wind”. These winds travel across interplanetary space and interact with the planets of the solar system, including the Earth. The beautiful display of aurorae near the north and south pole is in fact produced by this interaction. However, these winds could also be harmful, as they can erode away a stable planetary atmosphere, as was the case on Mars. While much is known about the solar wind – thanks in part to missions such as Solar Orbiter [below] – the same is not true for other cool stars. The problem is that we cannot see these stellar winds directly, limiting us to the study of their influence on the thin gas that fills the cavity between stars in the galaxy. However, this approach has several limitations and is only applicable to a few stars. This motivates the use of computer simulations and models to predict the various properties of stellar winds without requiring astronomers to observe them.
In this context, the PhD student Judy Chebly, scientist Dr Julián D. Alvarado-Gómez, and section head Professor Katja Poppenhäger from the Stellar Physics and Exoplanets section at the AIP, in collaboration with Cecilia Garraffo of the Center for Astrophysics at Harvard & Smithsonian, have performed the first systematic study of the stellar wind properties expected for F, G, K, and M stars. For this purpose, they used numerical simulations employing one of the most sophisticated models currently available, driven by the observed large-scale magnetic field distribution of 21 well-observed stars. The simulations were carried out in the supercomputing facilities of the AIP and the Leibniz Rechenzentrum (LRZ).
The team examined how the stars’ properties, such as gravity, magnetic field strength and rotation period, affect wind characteristics in terms of velocity or density. The results include a comprehensive characterization of the stellar wind properties across spectral types which, among other results, indicate the need to revisit previous assumptions on the stellar wind speeds when estimating the associated mass loss rates from observations. In addition, the simulations allow the prediction of the expected size of the Alfvén surface – the boundary between the star’s corona and its stellar wind. This information is fundamental to determine whether or not a planetary system might be subject to strong magnetic star-planet interactions, which can occur when the planetary orbit enters or is completely embedded within the Alfvén surface of its host star.
Their findings show that stars with magnetic fields larger than the Sun’s have faster winds. In some cases, the stellar wind speeds can be up to five times faster than the average solar wind speed, which is typically 450 km/s. The investigation obtained an assessment of how strong the winds of these stars are at the so-called “Habitable Zones”, defined as the orbital distances at which rocky exoplanets could sustain surface liquid water, provided an Earth-like atmospheric pressure. They found milder conditions around F and G-type stars, comparable to what the Earth experiences around the G-type Sun, and increasingly harsher wind environments for K and M-type stars. Such intense stellar winds strongly affect any potential atmosphere the planet might have.
This phenomenon is well documented in solar physics between rocky planets and the Sun, but not in the case of exoplanetary systems. This requires estimates of the stellar wind to assess processes similar to those we see between the solar winds and planetary atmospheres. Information on the stellar wind was previously unknown for F to M main sequence stars, making this study important in the context of habitability. The work presented in this paper was done for 21 stars, but the results are general enough to be applied to other cool main sequence stars. This investigation paves the way for future research on stellar wind observations and their impact on the erosion of planetary atmospheres.
The Leibnitz Institute for Astrophysics[Leibniz Institut fur Astrophysik Potsdam] | AIP (DE) is a German research institute. It is the successor of the Berlin Observatory founded in 1700 and of the Astrophysical Observatory Potsdam (AOP) founded in 1874. The latter was the world’s first observatory to emphasize explicitly the research area of astrophysics. The AIP was founded in 1992, in a re-structuring following the German reunification.
The AIP is privately funded and member of the Leibniz Association [Leibniz-Gemeinschaft](DE). It is located in Babelsberg in the state of Brandenburg, just west of Berlin, though the Einstein Tower solar observatory [below] and the great refractor telescope on Telegrafenberg [below] in Potsdam belong to the AIP.
The key topics of the AIP are cosmic magnetic fields (magnetohydrodynamics) on various scales and extragalactic astrophysics. Astronomical and astrophysical fields studied at the AIP range from solar and stellar physics to stellar and galactic evolution to cosmology.
The institute also develops research technology in the fields of spectroscopy and robotic telescopes. It is a partner of the Large Binocular Telescope in Arizona [below], has erected robotic telescopes in Tenerife [below] and the Antarctic, develops astronomical instrumentation for large telescopes such as the VLT of the ESO [below].
Furthermore, work on several e-Science projects are carried out at the AIP.
Main research areas:
Magnetohydrodynamics (MHD): Magnetic fields and turbulence in stars, accretion disks and galaxies; computer simulations ao dynamos, magnetic instabilities and magnetic convection.
Solar physics: Observation of sunspots and of solar magnetic field with spectro-polarimetry; Helioseismology and hydrodynamic numerical models; Study of coronal plasma processes by means of radio astronomy; Operation of the Observatory for Solar Radio Astronomy (OSRA) in Tremsdorf [below], with four radio antennas in different frequency bands from 40 MHz to 800 MHz.
Stellar physics: Numerical simulations of convection in stellar atmospheres, determination of stellar surface parameters and chemical abundances, winds and dust shells of red giants; Doppler tomography of stellar surface structures, development of robotic telescopes, as well as simulation of magnetic flux tubes.
Star formation and the interstellar medium: Brown dwarfs and low-mass stars, circumstellar disks, Origin of double and multiple-star systems.
Galaxies and quasars: Mother galaxies and surroundings of quasars, development of quasars and active galactic cores, structure and the story of the origin of the Milky Way, numerical computer simulations of the origin and development of galaxies.
Cosmology: Numerical simulation of the formation of large-scale structures. Semi-analytic models of galaxy formation and evolution. Predictions for future large observational surveys.
Participation in large international research projects:
Large Binocular Telescope [above]
The Large Binocular Telescope (LBT) is on Mt. Grahams in Arizona. The LBT consists of 2 huge 8.4 m telescopes on a common mount. With their 110 square meter area, the LBT is the largest telescope in the world on a single mount, only surpassed by the combined VLTs [above] and Keck.
The Radial Velocity Experiment measured until 2010 the radial velocities and elemental abundances of a million stars, predominantly in the southern celestial hemisphere. The 6dF multi-object spectrograph on the 1.2 m UK Schmidt telescope of the Anglo-Australian Observatory will be applied for this purpose.
The Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) investigates in detail a quarter of the whole sky and determine the position and absolute brightness of more than 100 million sky objects. Besides that, the distances of more than a million galaxies and quasars are estimated. With the help of this study, astronomers will be able to assess the distribution of large-scale structures in the Universe. This can provide hints about the story of the development of the Universe.
___________________________________________________________________ Apache Point Observatory SDSS Reflecting Ritchey–Chrétien Telescope at Apache Point Observatory, near Sunspot NM, Altitude 2,788 meters (9,147 ft).
LOFAR is a European radio interferometer, that measures radio waves with many individual antennas in different places which it combines to a single signal. One of these international LOFAR stations has been constructed in Bornim by Potsdam and is being operated by the AIP.
It was launched on 10 February 2020, and it will observe the Sun for at least seven years. The scientific payload consists of 10 instruments [below]: four in-situ instruments that measure the physical conditions (magnetic field, radio waves, energetic particles…) at the location of the spacecraft, and six remote sensing instruments that observe the Sun and its corona in various wavelength ranges. The AIP is involved in the operations and scientific exploitation of two instruments: the Spectrometer Telescope for Imaging X-rays (STIX), and the Energetic Particle Detector (EPD).
The German Astrophysical Virtual Observatory (GAVO) is an e-Science project, that creates a virtual observation platform to support modern astrophysical research in Germany. It is the German contribution to international efforts to establish a general Virtual Observatory. GAVO enables standardized access to German and international data archives.
The AIP is a partner in the LBT Consortium (LBTC) and contributes financially and materially in the construction of the Large Binocular Telescope. This entails both the development and the fabrication of the optics and the mechanical and electronic components as well as the development of the software for the acquisition, guiding and wavefront sensing units (AGWs). The AGW units are essential components of the telescope and indispensable for the adaptive optics.
The Multi Unit Spectroscopic Explorer (MUSE) is an instrument of the second generation for the VLT [above] of the ESO. MUSE is optimized for the observation of normal galaxies out to very high redshift. It will furthermore deliver detailed studies of nearby normal, interacting, and starburst galaxies.
“PEPSI” is a high-resolution spectrograph for the LBT. It will enable the simultaneous observation of circularly and linearly polarized light with high spectral and temporal resolution. The spectrograph is situated in a temperature- and pressure-stabilized room within the telescope column. The light will be conducted by fiber optics from the telescope to the spectrograph.
STELLA is a robotic observatory that consists of two 1.2 m telescopes. It is a long-term project to observe indicators of stellar activity of Sun-like stars. The operation occurs unattended — the telescopes decide the appropriate observation strategy automatically.
Observatory for Solar Radio Astronomy (“OSRA”)
“OSRA” Radio Antenna in Tremsdorf
The radio observatory “OSRA” was observing and recording radio emission from the Sun’s corona every day from 1990 until 2007. It was composed of four antennas, observing in four different frequency bands: 40–80 MHz, 100–170 MHz, 200–400 MHz and 400–800 MHz. The antennas were robotised to follow the Sun automatically. The observatory was located in Tremsdorf, near Potsdam.
“4MOST” is a multi-fiber, multi-spectrograph instrument that shall replace VIRCAM at the 4 m VISTA telescope and perform a 5-year survey of both galactic and extra-galactic targets.
Whereas the hardware has been designed and built by an international team of collaborators, the instrument is being assembled and tested at AIP. Contrary to most ESO projects, it shall be jointly operated by both ESO and the scientific consortium, with project management continuing to be hosted at AIP.
From AAS NOVA: “How We Lost a Gravitational Wave Source and Gained a Supernova”
Before exploding as supernovae, many massive stars — like the famous Eta Carinae shown in this Hubble image — lose large amounts of mass. Today’s article looks at a supernova that likely resulted from a star that underwent extreme mass loss. [J. Hester/Arizona State University, NASA/ESA; CC BY 4.0]
What started as the search for the source of a potential gravitational wave signal ended with the discovery of an unusual supernova. The supernova, SN2019wxt, showed a double-peaked light curve similar to previous ultra-stripped supernova candidates.
Location of the newly discovered transient, labeled AT2019wxt, in the outskirts of its host galaxy. [Shivkumar et al. 2023]
There and Gone
In December 2019, the LIGO and Virgo gravitational wave detectors distributed an alert for an event cataloged as S191213g, jump-starting a search for an electromagnetic counterpart to the possible gravitational wave signal.
In the days following the alert, multiple telescopes turned toward the source region for the signal, homing in on a rapidly evolving object that was brightening the outskirts of a compact galaxy about half a billion light-years from Earth. Further analysis of S191213g downgraded its significance as a gravitational wave signal, ending the search for its source — but the newly discovered object got even more interesting.
“Just” a Supernova
In a recent research article, Hinna Shivkumar (University of Amsterdam) and collaborators outlined the follow-up observations of this intriguing target. As early data trickled in, the object remained hard to classify, though its mostly featureless spectrum with a broad emission line from helium marked it as an exploding star that had lost its outer layers of hydrogen, and it gained the label SN2019wxt.
Optical and near-infrared light curves of SN2019wxt over three weeks following the initial detection. The i and g bands show the intriguing double-peaked shape. [SN2019wxt et al. 2023]
Shivkumar and coauthors used X-ray data from the Chandra X-ray Observatory, radio data from the Very Large Array, and optical images and spectra from telescopes across several continents to study the explosion further.
Among the astronomical assets involved in the work were the following, taken from the science paper:
Rather than showing a single peak to its light curve like a typical supernova, SN2019wxt peaked twice in just three days, making it one of the fastest-evolving supernovae known. Modeling of SN2019wxt’s light curve suggested that the first peak is due to rapid cooling of an expanding bubble of plasma, and the second peak is due to radioactive decay of material ejected in the explosion.
Double Peaked and Ultra-stripped?
Bolometric light curve of SN2019wxt (black circles) and best-fitting models of shock cooling (green dashed line) and radioactive decay (blue dashed line). [Shivkumar et al. 2023]
The unusual light curve, lack of hydrogen spectral lines, and modeled ejecta mass and explosion radius place SN2019wxt as a possible ultra-stripped-envelope core-collapse supernova. This rare class of supernovae contains only a few candidates, which are characterized by rapidly declining brightness, double-peaked light curves, and the presence of circumstellar material. These features point to stars that are stripped of much of their mass before exploding, leaving little material to be ejected in the explosion.
The serendipitous discovery of SN2019wxt makes for a great story, but to learn more about ultra-stripped supernovae in the future, we’ll need to catch them right when they happen. Luckily, the Vera C. Rubin Observatory’s long-awaited Legacy Survey of Space and Time draws ever closer, and after its anticipated start in 2025 will bring one million supernova detections each year — and thus millions of opportunities to study rare supernovae like SN2019wxt.
The mission of the American Astronomical Society is to enhance and share humanity’s scientific understanding of the Universe.
The Society, through its publications, disseminates and archives the results of astronomical research. The Society also communicates and explains our understanding of the universe to the public.
The Society facilitates and strengthens the interactions among members through professional meetings and other means. The Society supports member divisions representing specialized research and astronomical interests.
The Society represents the goals of its community of members to the nation and the world. The Society also works with other scientific and educational societies to promote the advancement of science.
The Society, through its members, trains, mentors and supports the next generation of astronomers. The Society supports and promotes increased participation of historically underrepresented groups in astronomy.
The Society assists its members to develop their skills in the fields of education and public outreach at all levels. The Society promotes broad interest in astronomy, which enhances science literacy and leads many to careers in science and engineering.
Adopted June 7, 2009
The society was founded in 1899 through the efforts of George Ellery Hale. The constitution of the group was written by Hale, George Comstock, Edward Morley, Simon Newcomb and Edward Charles Pickering. These men, plus four others, were the first Executive Council of the society; Newcomb was the first president. The initial membership was 114. The AAS name of the society was not finally decided until 1915, previously it was the “Astronomical and Astrophysical Society of America”. One proposed name that preceded this interim name was “American Astrophysical Society”.
The AAS today has over 7,000 members and six divisions – the Division for Planetary Sciences (1968); the Division on Dynamical Astronomy (1969); the High Energy Astrophysics Division (1969); the Solar Physics Division (1969); the Historical Astronomy Division (1980); and the Laboratory Astrophysics Division (2012). The membership includes physicists, mathematicians, geologists, engineers and others whose research interests lie within the broad spectrum of subjects now comprising contemporary astronomy.
In 2019 three AAS members were selected into the tenth anniversary class of TED Fellows.
The AAS established the AAS Fellows program in 2019 to “confer recognition upon AAS members for achievement and extraordinary service to the field of astronomy and the American Astronomical Society.” The inaugural class was designated by the AAS Board of Trustees and includes an initial group of 232 Legacy Fellows.
New Center for Astrophysics mission aims for closer look at photon rings and insight into nature of spacetime.
A group of international researchers led by the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard and Smithsonian (CfA) achieved the once-unimaginable four years ago: using a groundbreaking telescope to capture an image of a black hole.
Last month some of those researchers, engineers, and physicists convened at Harvard to consider and begin drawing up plans for the next step: a closer study of the photon rings that encircle black holes in glowing orange. The mission has been dubbed the Event Horizon Explorer (EHE), and the group hopes it will offer additional insight into black holes, which sit at the center of galaxies.
The $300 million project examining the nature of space and time builds on the success of the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) project of 2019, when researchers took the first-ever picture of a black hole, a focal point so tiny “the biggest ones on the sky are only about the same size as an atom held at arm’s length,” said Michael Johnson, an astrophysicist at the CfA.
“What we are trying to do now is launch a space mission that would improve the sharpness of the EHT images by a factor of 10,” Johnson said. This would reveal photon rings — rings made by the light orbiting a black hole. Johnson described these as similar to “a tiered wedding cake, where each time the light goes around, it piles up a sharper ring.” Currently, “We can’t see those in the EHT images. They’re too narrow to distinguish from the rest of the light near a black hole,” he said.
It’s a huge undertaking, but for the recently gathered team of more than 70 researchers, the project is beginning to look possible. “We were trying to figure out if there were any showstoppers. Was there any reason that we can’t launch this within the next 10 years? And the exciting thing was that there weren’t,” said Janice Houston, a systems engineer at the CfA. “We think that we can keep our foot on the gas and actually get this built within the next decade.”
The concept seems drawn from a Hollywood space odyssey. “Detecting the photon ring requires recording huge volumes of data on the spacecraft. We plan on using laser light to beam the information equivalent of the entire Library of Congress down to Earth,” said Peter Galison, Joseph Pellegrino University Professor in the History of Science and Physics and director of Harvard’s Black Hole Initiative.
However, the payoff could be hard proof of what once seemed impossible. Photon rings, for example, would provide proof that black holes at the centers of galaxies are spinning, and that they are dragging their space-time along with them as they rotate. Space-time is a mathematical model that describes the four-dimensional fabric of the cosmos — length, width, height, and time.
“If a black hole is spinning, it would distort the shape of the photon ring, squeezing it into an oval,” Galison said. If the EHE is able to measure the photon ring, “that will be a rock-solid measurement of the effects of the rotating black hole to bend the path of light itself.”
Before the EHE can launch, it faces immense challenges, from building sensitive receivers that are cooled to nearly absolute zero to record the light hitting the telescope, to launching a dish several meters in diameter with an exquisitely precise surface. “At NASA, we are always pushing the boundaries of engineering to explore entirely new parts of the universe,” said Eliad Peretz, a mission and instrument scientist at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. “This is a chance to bring together breakthrough technologies in many different systems to bring us closer than ever before to seeing the edge of the universe.”
Dominic Chang, who is studying physics in Harvard’s Griffin Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, is one of the scientists working on the theoretical physics driving the project. For the last two years, he’s been building physics-based models that “are quick to compute and can be fit to data to describe what’s happening in the 3D geometry of the spacetime.” During the workshop, Chang focused on science applications for the EHE, coming up with proposals that engineers would be able to reasonably construct.
“Basically, we wanted to come up with a set of ideas that we knew we could support with lots of simulations. And the workshop led to a flurry of new ideas. It’s amazing to be part of this project on the ground floor and to contribute to the burst of progress that is tied to a potential new experiment,” Chang said.
“This mission would have profound implications for multiple priority areas identified by the U.S. astronomy community in the last decadal survey,” said Peter Kurczynski, chief scientist of cosmic origins at NASA Goddard. “This is an extraordinary opportunity for us to finally understand how the enormous black holes in the centers of galaxies actually formed.”
FAS Dean of Science Christopher Stubbs addressed the workshop on one of its early days, giving the team guidance in a talk called “Going Big: A Scientist’s Guide to Big Projects and Large Collaborations.”
“It’s remarkable that this group, along with others, has managed to accomplish the paradoxical thing of imaging a black hole,” he said. “Leveraging that and moving forward is significant.”
Harvard University is the oldest institution of higher education in the United States, established in 1636 by vote of the Great and General Court of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. It was named after the College’s first benefactor, the young minister John Harvard of Charlestown, who upon his death in 1638 left his library and half his estate to the institution. A statue of John Harvard stands today in front of University Hall in Harvard Yard, and is perhaps the University’s best-known landmark.
Harvard University has 12 degree-granting Schools in addition to the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. The University has grown from nine students with a single master to an enrollment of more than 20,000 degree candidates including undergraduate, graduate, and professional students. There are more than 360,000 living alumni in the U.S. and over 190 other countries.
The Massachusetts colonial legislature, the General Court, authorized Harvard University’s founding. In its early years, Harvard College primarily trained Congregational and Unitarian clergy, although it has never been formally affiliated with any denomination. Its curriculum and student body were gradually secularized during the 18th century, and by the 19th century, Harvard University (US) had emerged as the central cultural establishment among the Boston elite. Following the American Civil War, President Charles William Eliot’s long tenure (1869–1909) transformed the college and affiliated professional schools into a modern research university; Harvard became a founding member of the Association of American Universities in 1900. James B. Conant led the university through the Great Depression and World War II; he liberalized admissions after the war.
The university is composed of ten academic faculties plus the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. Arts and Sciences offers study in a wide range of academic disciplines for undergraduates and for graduates, while the other faculties offer only graduate degrees, mostly professional. Harvard has three main campuses: the 209-acre (85 ha) Cambridge campus centered on Harvard Yard; an adjoining campus immediately across the Charles River in the Allston neighborhood of Boston; and the medical campus in Boston’s Longwood Medical Area. Harvard University’s endowment is valued at $41.9 billion, making it the largest of any academic institution. Endowment income helps enable the undergraduate college to admit students regardless of financial need and provide generous financial aid with no loans The Harvard Library is the world’s largest academic library system, comprising 79 individual libraries holding about 20.4 million items.
Harvard University has more alumni, faculty, and researchers who have won Nobel Prizes (161) and Fields Medals (18) than any other university in the world and more alumni who have been members of the U.S. Congress, MacArthur Fellows, Rhodes Scholars (375), and Marshall Scholars (255) than any other university in the United States. Its alumni also include eight U.S. presidents and 188 living billionaires, the most of any university. Fourteen Turing Award laureates have been Harvard affiliates. Students and alumni have also won 10 Academy Awards, 48 Pulitzer Prizes, and 108 Olympic medals (46 gold), and they have founded many notable companies.
Colonial
Harvard University was established in 1636 by vote of the Great and General Court of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. In 1638, it acquired British North America’s first known printing press. In 1639, it was named Harvard College after deceased clergyman John Harvard, an alumnus of the University of Cambridge(UK) who had left the school £779 and his library of some 400 volumes. The charter creating the Harvard Corporation was granted in 1650.
A 1643 publication gave the school’s purpose as “to advance learning and perpetuate it to posterity, dreading to leave an illiterate ministry to the churches when our present ministers shall lie in the dust.” It trained many Puritan ministers in its early years and offered a classic curriculum based on the English university model—many leaders in the colony had attended the University of Cambridge—but conformed to the tenets of Puritanism. Harvard University has never affiliated with any particular denomination, though many of its earliest graduates went on to become clergymen in Congregational and Unitarian churches.
Increase Mather served as president from 1681 to 1701. In 1708, John Leverett became the first president who was not also a clergyman, marking a turning of the college away from Puritanism and toward intellectual independence.
19th century
In the 19th century, Enlightenment ideas of reason and free will were widespread among Congregational ministers, putting those ministers and their congregations in tension with more traditionalist, Calvinist parties. When Hollis Professor of Divinity David Tappan died in 1803 and President Joseph Willard died a year later, a struggle broke out over their replacements. Henry Ware was elected to the Hollis chair in 1805, and the liberal Samuel Webber was appointed to the presidency two years later, signaling the shift from the dominance of traditional ideas at Harvard to the dominance of liberal, Arminian ideas.
Charles William Eliot, president 1869–1909, eliminated the favored position of Christianity from the curriculum while opening it to student self-direction. Though Eliot was the crucial figure in the secularization of American higher education, he was motivated not by a desire to secularize education but by Transcendentalist Unitarian convictions influenced by William Ellery Channing and Ralph Waldo Emerson.
20th century
In the 20th century, Harvard University’s reputation grew as a burgeoning endowment and prominent professors expanded the university’s scope. Rapid enrollment growth continued as new graduate schools were begun and the undergraduate college expanded. Radcliffe College, established in 1879 as the female counterpart of Harvard College, became one of the most prominent schools for women in the United States. Harvard University became a founding member of the Association of American Universities in 1900.
The student body in the early decades of the century was predominantly “old-stock, high-status Protestants, especially Episcopalians, Congregationalists, and Presbyterians.” A 1923 proposal by President A. Lawrence Lowell that Jews be limited to 15% of undergraduates was rejected, but Lowell did ban blacks from freshman dormitories.
President James B. Conant reinvigorated creative scholarship to guarantee Harvard University’s preeminence among research institutions. He saw higher education as a vehicle of opportunity for the talented rather than an entitlement for the wealthy, so Conant devised programs to identify, recruit, and support talented youth. In 1943, he asked the faculty to make a definitive statement about what general education ought to be, at the secondary as well as at the college level. The resulting Report, published in 1945, was one of the most influential manifestos in 20th century American education.
Between 1945 and 1960, admissions were opened up to bring in a more diverse group of students. No longer drawing mostly from select New England prep schools, the undergraduate college became accessible to striving middle class students from public schools; many more Jews and Catholics were admitted, but few blacks, Hispanics, or Asians. Throughout the rest of the 20th century, Harvard became more diverse.
Harvard University’s graduate schools began admitting women in small numbers in the late 19th century. During World War II, students at Radcliffe College (which since 1879 had been paying Harvard University professors to repeat their lectures for women) began attending Harvard University classes alongside men. Women were first admitted to the medical school in 1945. Since 1971, Harvard University has controlled essentially all aspects of undergraduate admission, instruction, and housing for Radcliffe women. In 1999, Radcliffe was formally merged into Harvard University.
21st century
Drew Gilpin Faust, previously the dean of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, became Harvard University’s first woman president on July 1, 2007. She was succeeded by Lawrence Bacow on July 1, 2018.
Founded in 1973 and headquartered in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the CfA leads a broad program of research in astronomy, astrophysics, Earth and space sciences, as well as science education. The CfA either leads or participates in the development and operations of more than fifteen ground- and space-based astronomical research observatories across the electromagnetic spectrum, including the forthcoming Giant Magellan Telescope(CL) and the Chandra X-ray Observatory, one of NASA’s Great Observatories.
Hosting more than 850 scientists, engineers, and support staff, the CfA is among the largest astronomical research institutes in the world. Its projects have included Nobel Prize-winning advances in cosmology and high energy astrophysics, the discovery of many exoplanets, and the first image of a black hole. The CfA also serves a major role in the global astrophysics research community: the CfA’s Astrophysics Data System, for example, has been universally adopted as the world’s online database of astronomy and physics papers. Known for most of its history as the “Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics”, the CfA rebranded in 2018 to its current name in an effort to reflect its unique status as a joint collaboration between Harvard University and the Smithsonian Institution. The CfA’s current Director (since 2004) is Charles R. Alcock, who succeeds Irwin I. Shapiro (Director from 1982 to 2004) and George B. Field (Director from 1973 to 1982).
The Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian is not formally an independent legal organization, but rather an institutional entity operated under a Memorandum of Understanding between Harvard University and the Smithsonian Institution. This collaboration was formalized on July 1, 1973, with the goal of coordinating the related research activities of the Harvard College Observatory (HCO) and the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory (SAO) under the leadership of a single Director, and housed within the same complex of buildings on the Harvard campus in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The CfA’s history is therefore also that of the two fully independent organizations that comprise it. With a combined lifetime of more than 300 years, HCO and SAO have been host to major milestones in astronomical history that predate the CfA’s founding.
History of the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory (SAO)
Samuel Pierpont Langley, the third Secretary of the Smithsonian, founded the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory on the south yard of the Smithsonian Castle (on the U.S. National Mall) on March 1,1890. The Astrophysical Observatory’s initial, primary purpose was to “record the amount and character of the Sun’s heat”. Charles Greeley Abbot was named SAO’s first director, and the observatory operated solar telescopes to take daily measurements of the Sun’s intensity in different regions of the optical electromagnetic spectrum. In doing so, the observatory enabled Abbot to make critical refinements to the Solar constant, as well as to serendipitously discover Solar variability. It is likely that SAO’s early history as a solar observatory was part of the inspiration behind the Smithsonian’s “sunburst” logo, designed in 1965 by Crimilda Pontes.
In 1955, the scientific headquarters of SAO moved from Washington, D.C. to Cambridge, Massachusetts to affiliate with the Harvard College Observatory (HCO). Fred Lawrence Whipple, then the chairman of the Harvard Astronomy Department, was named the new director of SAO. The collaborative relationship between SAO and HCO therefore predates the official creation of the CfA by 18 years. SAO’s move to Harvard’s campus also resulted in a rapid expansion of its research program. Following the launch of Sputnik (the world’s first human-made satellite) in 1957, SAO accepted a national challenge to create a worldwide satellite-tracking network, collaborating with the United States Air Force on Project Space Track.
With the creation of National Aeronautics and Space Administration the following year and throughout the space race, SAO led major efforts in the development of orbiting observatories and large ground-based telescopes, laboratory and theoretical astrophysics, as well as the application of computers to astrophysical problems.
History of Harvard College Observatory (HCO)
Partly in response to renewed public interest in astronomy following the 1835 return of Halley’s Comet, the Harvard College Observatory was founded in 1839, when the Harvard Corporation appointed William Cranch Bond as an “Astronomical Observer to the University”. For its first four years of operation, the observatory was situated at the Dana-Palmer House (where Bond also resided) near Harvard Yard, and consisted of little more than three small telescopes and an astronomical clock. In his 1840 book recounting the history of the college, then Harvard President Josiah Quincy III noted that “…there is wanted a reflecting telescope equatorially mounted…”. This telescope, the 15-inch “Great Refractor”, opened seven years later (in 1847) at the top of Observatory Hill in Cambridge (where it still exists today, housed in the oldest of the CfA’s complex of buildings). The telescope was the largest in the United States from 1847 until 1867. William Bond and pioneer photographer John Adams Whipple used the Great Refractor to produce the first clear Daguerrotypes of the Moon (winning them an award at the 1851 Great Exhibition in London). Bond and his son, George Phillips Bond (the second Director of HCO), used it to discover Saturn’s 8th moon, Hyperion (which was also independently discovered by William Lassell).
Under the directorship of Edward Charles Pickering from 1877 to 1919, the observatory became the world’s major producer of stellar spectra and magnitudes, established an observing station in Peru, and applied mass-production methods to the analysis of data. It was during this time that HCO became host to a series of major discoveries in astronomical history, powered by the Observatory’s so-called “Computers” (women hired by Pickering as skilled workers to process astronomical data). These “Computers” included Williamina Fleming; Annie Jump Cannon; Henrietta Swan Leavitt; Florence Cushman; and Antonia Maury, all widely recognized today as major figures in scientific history. Henrietta Swan Leavitt, for example, discovered the so-called period-luminosity relation for Classical Cepheid variable stars, establishing the first major “standard candle” with which to measure the distance to galaxies. Now called “Leavitt’s Law”, the discovery is regarded as one of the most foundational and important in the history of astronomy; astronomers like Edwin Hubble, for example, would later use Leavitt’s Law to establish that the Universe is expanding, the primary piece of evidence for the Big Bang model.
Upon Pickering’s retirement in 1921, the Directorship of HCO fell to Harlow Shapley (a major participant in the so-called “Great Debate” of 1920). This era of the observatory was made famous by the work of Cecelia Payne-Gaposchkin, who became the first woman to earn a Ph.D. in astronomy from Radcliffe College (a short walk from the Observatory). Payne-Gapochkin’s 1925 thesis proposed that stars were composed primarily of hydrogen and helium, an idea thought ridiculous at the time. Between Shapley’s tenure and the formation of the CfA, the observatory was directed by Donald H. Menzel and then Leo Goldberg, both of whom maintained widely recognized programs in solar and stellar astrophysics. Menzel played a major role in encouraging the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory to move to Cambridge and collaborate more closely with HCO.
Joint history as the Center for Astrophysics (CfA)
The collaborative foundation for what would ultimately give rise to the Center for Astrophysics began with SAO’s move to Cambridge in 1955. Fred Whipple, who was already chair of the Harvard Astronomy Department (housed within HCO since 1931), was named SAO’s new director at the start of this new era; an early test of the model for a unified Directorship across HCO and SAO. The following 18 years would see the two independent entities merge ever closer together, operating effectively (but informally) as one large research center.
This joint relationship was formalized as the new Harvard–Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics on July 1, 1973. George B. Field, then affiliated with University of California- Berkeley, was appointed as its first Director. That same year, a new astronomical journal, the CfA Preprint Series was created, and a CfA/SAO instrument flying aboard Skylab discovered coronal holes on the Sun. The founding of the CfA also coincided with the birth of X-ray astronomy as a new, major field that was largely dominated by CfA scientists in its early years. Riccardo Giacconi, regarded as the “father of X-ray astronomy”, founded the High Energy Astrophysics Division within the new CfA by moving most of his research group (then at American Sciences and Engineering) to SAO in 1973. That group would later go on to launch the Einstein Observatory (the first imaging X-ray telescope) in 1976, and ultimately lead the proposals and development of what would become the Chandra X-ray Observatory. Chandra, the second of NASA’s Great Observatories and still the most powerful X-ray telescope in history, continues operations today as part of the CfA’s Chandra X-ray Center. Giacconi would later win the 2002 Nobel Prize in Physics for his foundational work in X-ray astronomy.
Shortly after the launch of the Einstein Observatory, the CfA’s Steven Weinberg won the 1979 Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on electroweak unification. The following decade saw the start of the landmark CfA Redshift Survey (the first attempt to map the large scale structure of the Universe), as well as the release of the Field Report, a highly influential Astronomy & Astrophysics Decadal Survey chaired by the outgoing CfA Director George Field. He would be replaced in 1982 by Irwin Shapiro, who during his tenure as Director (1982 to 2004) oversaw the expansion of the CfA’s observing facilities around the world.
CfA-led discoveries throughout this period include canonical work on Supernova 1987A, the “CfA2 Great Wall” (then the largest known coherent structure in the Universe), the best-yet evidence for supermassive black holes, and the first convincing evidence for an extrasolar planet.
The 1990s also saw the CfA unwittingly play a major role in the history of computer science and the internet: in 1990, SAO developed SAOImage, one of the world’s first X11-based applications made publicly available (its successor, DS9, remains the most widely used astronomical FITS image viewer worldwide). During this time, scientists at the CfA also began work on what would become the Astrophysics Data System (ADS), one of the world’s first online databases of research papers. By 1993, the ADS was running the first routine transatlantic queries between databases, a foundational aspect of the internet today.
The CfA Today
Research at the CfA
Charles Alcock, known for a number of major works related to massive compact halo objects, was named the third director of the CfA in 2004. Today Alcock overseas one of the largest and most productive astronomical institutes in the world, with more than 850 staff and an annual budget in excess of $100M. The Harvard Department of Astronomy, housed within the CfA, maintains a continual complement of approximately 60 Ph.D. students, more than 100 postdoctoral researchers, and roughly 25 undergraduate majors in astronomy and astrophysics from Harvard College. SAO, meanwhile, hosts a long-running and highly rated REU Summer Intern program as well as many visiting graduate students. The CfA estimates that roughly 10% of the professional astrophysics community in the United States spent at least a portion of their career or education there.
The CfA is either a lead or major partner in the operations of the Fred Lawrence Whipple Observatory, the Submillimeter Array, MMT Observatory, the South Pole Telescope, VERITAS, and a number of other smaller ground-based telescopes. The CfA’s 2019-2024 Strategic Plan includes the construction of the Giant Magellan Telescope as a driving priority for the Center.
Along with the Chandra X-ray Observatory, the CfA plays a central role in a number of space-based observing facilities, including the recently launched Parker Solar Probe, Kepler Space Telescope, the Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO), and HINODE. The CfA, via the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory, recently played a major role in the Lynx X-ray Observatory, a NASA-Funded Large Mission Concept Study commissioned as part of the 2020 Decadal Survey on Astronomy and Astrophysics (“Astro2020”). If launched, Lynx would be the most powerful X-ray observatory constructed to date, enabling order-of-magnitude advances in capability over Chandra.
SAO is one of the 13 stakeholder institutes for the Event Horizon Telescope Board, and the CfA hosts its Array Operations Center. In 2019, the project revealed the first direct image of a black hole.
The result is widely regarded as a triumph not only of observational radio astronomy, but of its intersection with theoretical astrophysics. Union of the observational and theoretical subfields of astrophysics has been a major focus of the CfA since its founding.
In 2018, the CfA rebranded, changing its official name to the “Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian” in an effort to reflect its unique status as a joint collaboration between Harvard University and the Smithsonian Institution. Today, the CfA receives roughly 70% of its funding from NASA, 22% from Smithsonian federal funds, and 4% from the National Science Foundation. The remaining 4% comes from contributors including the United States Department of Energy, the Annenberg Foundation, as well as other gifts and endowments.
Penn Professors Vijay Balasubramanian and Mark Devlin offer a broader understanding of a recent paper’s claim that the universe could be 26.7 billion years old.
NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope has produced the deepest and sharpest infrared image of the distant universe to date. Known as Webb’s First Deep Field, this image of galaxy cluster SMACS 0723 is rich with detail. Thousands of galaxies—including the faintest objects ever observed in the infrared—have appeared in Webb’s view for the first time. The image shows the galaxy cluster SMACS 0723 as it appeared 4.6 billion years ago. The combined mass of this galaxy cluster acts as a gravitational lens, magnifying much more distant galaxies behind it. Webb’s Near-Infra Red Cam has brought those distant galaxies into sharp focus—they have tiny, faint structures that have never been seen before, including star clusters and diffuse features. (Image: NASA, ESA, CSA, and STScI)
Could the universe be twice as old as current estimates put forward? Rajendra Gupta of the University of Ottawa recently published a paper [MNRAS (below)] suggesting just that. Gupta claims the universe may be around 26.7 billion years rather than the commonly accepted 13.8 billion. The news has generated many headlines as well as criticism [Science News (below)] from astronomers and the larger scientific community.
Penn Today met with professors Vijay Balasubramanian and Mark Devlin to discuss Gupta’s findings and better understand the rationale of these claims and how they fit in the broader context of problems astronomers are attempting to solve.
___________________________________________________________________________________ How do we know how old the universe actually is?
Balasubramanian: The universe is often reported to be 13.8 billion years old, but, truth be told, this is an amalgamation of various measurements that factor in different kinds of data involving the apparent ages of ‘stuff’ in the universe.
This stuff includes observable or ordinary matter like you, me, galaxies far and near, stars, radiation, and the planets, then dark matter—the sort of matter that doesn’t interact with light and which makes up about 27% of the universe—and finally, dark energy, which makes up a massive chunk of the universe, around 68%, and is what we believe is causing the universe to expand.
And so, we take as much information as we can about the stuff and build what we call a consensus model of the universe, essentially a line of best fit. We call the model the Lambda Cold Dark Matter (ΛCDM).
Lambda represents the cosmological constant, which is linked to dark energy, namely how it drives the expansion of the universe according to Albert Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity. In this framework, how matter and energy behave in the universe determines the geometry of spacetime, which in turn influences how matter and energy move throughout the cosmos. Including this cosmological constant, Lambda, allows for an explanation of a universe that expands at an accelerating rate, which is consistent with our observations.
Now, the Cold Dark Matter part represents a hypothetical form of dark matter. ‘Dark’ here means that it neither interacts with nor emits light, so it’s very hard to detect. ‘Cold’ refers to the fact that its particles move slowly because when things cool down their components move less, whereas when they heat up the components get excited and move around more relative to the speed of light.
So, when you consider the early formation of the universe, this ‘slowness’ influences the formation of structures in the universe like galaxies and clusters of galaxies, in that smaller structures like the galaxies form before the larger ones, the clusters.
Devlin: And then taking a step back, the way cosmology works and pieces how old things are is that we look at the way the universe looks today, how all the structures are arranged within it, and we compare it to how it used to be with a set of cosmological parameters like Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) radiation, the afterglow of the Big Bang, and the oldest known source of electromagnetic radiation, or light.
We also refer to it as the baby picture of the universe because it offers us a glimpse of what it looked like at 380,000 years old, long before stars and galaxies were formed.
And what we know about the physical nature of the universe from the CMB is that it was something really smooth, dense, and hot. And as it continued to expand and cool, the density started to vary, and these variations became the seeds for the formation of cosmic structures.
The denser regions of the universe began to collapse under their own gravity, forming the first stars, galaxies, and clusters of galaxies. So, this is why, when we look at the universe today, we see this massive cosmic web of galaxies and clusters separated by vast voids. This process of structure formation is still ongoing.
And, so, the ΛCDM model suggests that the primary driver of this structure formation was dark matter, which exerts gravity and which began to clump together soon after the Big Bang. These clumps of dark matter attracted the ordinary matter, forming the seeds of galaxies and larger cosmic structures.
So, with models like the ΛCDM and the knowledge of how fast light travels, we can add bits of information, or parameters, and we have from things like the CMB and other sources of light in our universe, like the ones we get from other distant galaxies, and we see this roadmap for the universe that gives us it’s likely age. Which we think is somewhere in the ballpark of 13.8 billion years.
How did Gupta get 26.7 billion?
Devlin: In thinking about the evolution of the universe and the parameters we’ve used to develop the understanding we have, we could use the term ‘roadmap’ and extend it to a metaphor.
For instance, say I drove from my office at David Rittenhouse Labs here in Philadelphia to the Griffith Observatory in Los Angeles. There are many different paths I could have used to get there, but you’re interested in the one I actually used. To figure that out, you would probably say, ‘He can’t just drive in a straight line towards Los Angeles; he needs to pass through five specific cities or checkpoints.’
And once you constrain the potential path to those checkpoints, you get a hypothetical path that more precisely maps my specific route. Then you could define it more precisely by adding more and more cities, which would give you an even closer approximation to the exact path I used.
And so, much like how you would approximate my path from Philly to Los Angeles, what we can reliably do with the universe is come up with a prediction of what its state would have been like at a certain epoch, then we can check to see how close our approximation was and it’s usually really close. It’s like saying you know I went through Chicago and Denver and then predicting all the other cities and getting it all correct.
The speed of light is a critical constant we use to determine these checkpoints. Since light takes time to travel, observing it from distant cosmic objects lets us kind of look back in time. Essentially, the further away an object is, the longer its light has taken to get to us, and therefore the older the state we observe it in. This idea forms the basis for determining the checkpoints in our cosmic journey, with each unique observation of light corresponding to a specific era in the universe’s history.
By measuring the universe’s state at these different epochs, we piece together its evolutionary path. The more measurements we make—or, extending our metaphor, the more ‘cities’ we add—the more accurately we can chart the universe’s journey from its inception to its current state.
And, much like our hypothetical cross-country journey, there’s always room for discovery and refinement in this cosmic roadmap, which is what this paper has attempted—sort of.
He’s offering an explanation for some recent James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) observations that suggest distant galaxies are more mature than ΛCDM would allow for.
Balasubramanian: The issue this paper is trying to address is called the “impossible early galaxy problem”, and he is proposing a hybrid model that affixes the ΛCDM to a theory that posits light gets ‘tired’ as it travels over billions and billions of years, namely that it loses energy through various mechanisms.
Other versions of this idea include theories that fundamental constants like the speed of light varied over time. In essence, the paper suggests that redshift—a phenomenon where light or other electromagnetic radiation from an object increases in wavelength, or ‘shifts’ towards the red end of the spectrum, indicating that the object is moving away from the observer—has been calibrated incorrectly.
The tired light idea isn’t new, and it’s been around for a while; it was proposed in 1929 by Fritz Zwicky soon after Edwin Hubble first recorded how the redshift of a galaxy was correlated with its distance away from the observer, meaning us.
This tired light idea was devised at a time when the expanding universe theory wasn’t as commonplace and was partly intended to explore the possibility that Hubble’s observations could be consistent with a static universe. But the idea was later largely refuted and ruled out in favor of the ΛCDM model.
However, in this paper, the researchers aren’t claiming the universe is static. They’re saying that the redshift of the light from faraway galaxies could be caused by both the expansion of the universe and tired light under a specific set of conditions from their hybrid model. By combining these models and making tweaks to the parameters for ΛCDM, you get a figure that better explains the JWST data.
Essentially, they’re changing the calibration between redshift and the length of time that the light has been traveling for.
So, instead of a redshift of 10, which means that the light has been traveling for around 13 billion years after being emitted by the Big Bang when the universe was around 380 million years old, the paper suggests that the light has been traveling for 21 billion years and was emitted when the universe was around 5 billion years old.
Does anyone believe this claim?
Balasubramanian: This is the wonderful thing about the scientific process; we make our claims publicly and leave it to the community to counter or corroborate them. The discussion is open, and that’s what we’re going to see play out with this paper. And the rate at which claims are validated or not is directly proportional to how many people decide if the claim is interesting enough to work on. This claim is interesting, so I suspect the debate will be settled quite quickly.
Devlin: Regardless of all this cosmology stuff, you can literally measure the age of rocks on the earth and rocks in our solar system and calculate age of globular clusters by looking at their physical partners, and there isn’t anything anywhere near that old. If there were something or anything close to 20 billion years old, we would have seen it by now, so I think this claim isn’t likely to pick up much more steam or change things. The problem with this work is that it requires messing with all that we know about the universe to accommodate this new JWST image.
Two things become an issue: The new ‘fix’ has not demonstrated all the above; and the data are not nearly convincing enough to require it.
Overall, I think it’s very cool that we have this abundance of data and that our telescopes are allowing us to see more than ever before and draw new conclusions that challenge our understanding of the universe.
The NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space based Infrared Astronomy Telescope is a large infrared telescope with a 6.5-meter primary mirror. Webb was finally launched December 25, 2021, ten years late. Webb will be the premier observatory of the next decade, serving thousands of astronomers worldwide. It will study every phase in the history of our Universe, ranging from the first luminous glows after the Big Bang, to the formation of solar systems capable of supporting life on planets like Earth, to the evolution of our own Solar System.
Webb is the world’s largest, most powerful, and most complex space science telescope ever built. Webb will solve mysteries in our solar system, look beyond to distant worlds around other stars, and probe the mysterious structures and origins of our universe and our place in it.
Webb was formerly known as the “Next Generation Space Telescope” (NGST); it was renamed in Sept. 2002 after a former NASA administrator, James Webb.
Several innovative technologies have been developed for Webb. These include a folding, segmented primary mirror, adjusted to shape after launch; ultra-lightweight beryllium optics; detectors able to record extremely weak signals, microshutters that enable programmable object selection for the spectrograph; and a cryocooler for cooling the mid-IR detectors to 7K.
Webb’s instruments are designed to work primarily in the infrared range of the electromagnetic spectrum, with some capability in the visible range. It will be sensitive to light from 0.6 to 28 micrometers in wavelength.
Webb has four main science themes: The End of the Dark Ages: First Light and Reionization, The Assembly of Galaxies, The Birth of Stars and Protoplanetary Systems, and Planetary Systems and the Origins of Life.
Launch was December 25, 2021, ten years late, on an Ariane 5 rocket. The launch was from Arianespace’s ELA-3 launch complex at European Spaceport located near Kourou, French Guiana. Webb is located at the second Lagrange point, about a million miles from the Earth.
Formerly known as the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, the School of Arts and Sciences is an umbrella organization that is divided into three main academic components: The College of Arts & Sciences is Penn’s undergraduate liberal arts school. The Graduate Division offers post-undergraduate M.A., M.S., and Ph.D. programs. Finally, the College of Liberal and Professional Studies, originally called “College of General Studies”, is Penn’s continuing and professional education division, catered to working professionals.
The School of Arts and Sciences contains the following departments:
Africana Studies
Anthropology
Biology
Chemistry
Classical Studies
Criminology
Earth and Environmental Science
East Asian Languages & Civilizations
Economics
English
Germanic Languages and Literatures
History
History and Sociology of Science
History of Art
Linguistics
Mathematics
Music
Near Eastern Languages & Civilizations
Philosophy
Physics and Astronomy
Political Science
Psychology
Religious Studies
Romance Languages
Russian and East European Studies
Sociology
South Asia Studies
Academic life at University of Pennsylvania is unparalleled, with 100 countries and every U.S. state represented in one of the Ivy League’s most diverse student bodies. Consistently ranked among the top 10 universities in the country, Penn enrolls 10,000 undergraduate students and welcomes an additional 10,000 students to our world-renowned graduate and professional schools.
Penn’s award-winning educators and scholars encourage students to pursue inquiry and discovery, follow their passions, and address the world’s most challenging problems through an interdisciplinary approach.
The University of Pennsylvania is a private Ivy League research university in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The university claims a founding date of 1740 and is one of the nine colonial colleges chartered prior to the U.S. Declaration of Independence. Benjamin Franklin, Penn’s founder and first president, advocated an educational program that trained leaders in commerce, government, and public service, similar to a modern liberal arts curriculum.
Penn has four undergraduate schools as well as twelve graduate and professional schools. Schools enrolling undergraduates include the College of Arts and Sciences; the School of Engineering and Applied Science; the Wharton School; and the School of Nursing. Penn’s “One University Policy” allows students to enroll in classes in any of Penn’s twelve schools. Among its highly ranked graduate and professional schools are a law school whose first professor wrote the first draft of the United States Constitution, the first school of medicine in North America (Perelman School of Medicine, 1765), and the first collegiate business school (Wharton School, 1881).
Penn is also home to the first “student union” building and organization (Houston Hall, 1896), the first Catholic student club in North America (Newman Center, 1893), the first double-decker college football stadium (Franklin Field, 1924 when second deck was constructed), and Morris Arboretum, the official arboretum of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. The first general-purpose electronic computer (ENIAC) was developed at Penn and formally dedicated in 1946. In 2019, the university had an endowment of $14.65 billion, the sixth-largest endowment of all universities in the United States, as well as a research budget of $1.02 billion. The university’s athletics program, the Quakers, fields varsity teams in 33 sports as a member of the NCAA Division I Ivy League conference.
As of 2018, distinguished alumni and/or Trustees include three U.S. Supreme Court justices; 32 U.S. senators; 46 U.S. governors; 163 members of the U.S. House of Representatives; eight signers of the Declaration of Independence and seven signers of the U.S. Constitution (four of whom signed both representing two-thirds of the six people who signed both); 24 members of the Continental Congress; 14 foreign heads of state and two presidents of the United States, including Donald Trump. As of October 2019, 36 Nobel laureates; 80 members of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences; 64 billionaires; 29 Rhodes Scholars; 15 Marshall Scholars and 16 Pulitzer Prize winners have been affiliated with the university.
History
The University of Pennsylvania considers itself the fourth-oldest institution of higher education in the United States, though this is contested by Princeton University and Columbia University. The university also considers itself as the first university in the United States with both undergraduate and graduate studies.
In 1740, a group of Philadelphians joined together to erect a great preaching hall for the traveling evangelist George Whitefield, who toured the American colonies delivering open-air sermons. The building was designed and built by Edmund Woolley and was the largest building in the city at the time, drawing thousands of people the first time it was preached in. It was initially planned to serve as a charity school as well, but a lack of funds forced plans for the chapel and school to be suspended. According to Franklin’s autobiography, it was in 1743 when he first had the idea to establish an academy, “thinking the Rev. Richard Peters a fit person to superintend such an institution”. However, Peters declined a casual inquiry from Franklin and nothing further was done for another six years. In the fall of 1749, now more eager to create a school to educate future generations, Benjamin Franklin circulated a pamphlet titled Proposals Relating to the Education of Youth in Pensilvania, his vision for what he called a “Public Academy of Philadelphia”. Unlike the other colonial colleges that existed in 1749—Harvard University, William & Mary, Yale Unversity, and The College of New Jersey—Franklin’s new school would not focus merely on education for the clergy. He advocated an innovative concept of higher education, one which would teach both the ornamental knowledge of the arts and the practical skills necessary for making a living and doing public service. The proposed program of study could have become the nation’s first modern liberal arts curriculum, although it was never implemented because Anglican priest William Smith (1727-1803), who became the first provost, and other trustees strongly preferred the traditional curriculum.
Franklin assembled a board of trustees from among the leading citizens of Philadelphia, the first such non-sectarian board in America. At the first meeting of the 24 members of the board of trustees on November 13, 1749, the issue of where to locate the school was a prime concern. Although a lot across Sixth Street from the old Pennsylvania State House (later renamed and famously known since 1776 as “Independence Hall”), was offered without cost by James Logan, its owner, the trustees realized that the building erected in 1740, which was still vacant, would be an even better site. The original sponsors of the dormant building still owed considerable construction debts and asked Franklin’s group to assume their debts and, accordingly, their inactive trusts. On February 1, 1750, the new board took over the building and trusts of the old board. On August 13, 1751, the “Academy of Philadelphia”, using the great hall at 4th and Arch Streets, took in its first secondary students. A charity school also was chartered on July 13, 1753 by the intentions of the original “New Building” donors, although it lasted only a few years. On June 16, 1755, the “College of Philadelphia” was chartered, paving the way for the addition of undergraduate instruction. All three schools shared the same board of trustees and were considered to be part of the same institution. The first commencement exercises were held on May 17, 1757.
The institution of higher learning was known as the College of Philadelphia from 1755 to 1779. In 1779, not trusting then-provost the Reverend William Smith’s “Loyalist” tendencies, the revolutionary State Legislature created a University of the State of Pennsylvania. The result was a schism, with Smith continuing to operate an attenuated version of the College of Philadelphia. In 1791, the legislature issued a new charter, merging the two institutions into a new University of Pennsylvania with twelve men from each institution on the new board of trustees.
Penn has three claims to being the first university in the United States, according to university archives director Mark Frazier Lloyd: the 1765 founding of the first medical school in America made Penn the first institution to offer both “undergraduate” and professional education; the 1779 charter made it the first American institution of higher learning to take the name of “University”; and existing colleges were established as seminaries (although, as detailed earlier, Penn adopted a traditional seminary curriculum as well).
After being located in downtown Philadelphia for more than a century, the campus was moved across the Schuylkill River to property purchased from the Blockley Almshouse in West Philadelphia in 1872, where it has since remained in an area now known as University City. Although Penn began operating as an academy or secondary school in 1751 and obtained its collegiate charter in 1755, it initially designated 1750 as its founding date; this is the year that appears on the first iteration of the university seal. Sometime later in its early history, Penn began to consider 1749 as its founding date and this year was referenced for over a century, including at the centennial celebration in 1849. In 1899, the board of trustees voted to adjust the founding date earlier again, this time to 1740, the date of “the creation of the earliest of the many educational trusts the University has taken upon itself”. The board of trustees voted in response to a three-year campaign by Penn’s General Alumni Society to retroactively revise the university’s founding date to appear older than Princeton University, which had been chartered in 1746.
Research, innovations and discoveries
Penn is classified as an “R1” doctoral university: “Highest research activity.” Its economic impact on the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania for 2015 amounted to $14.3 billion. Penn’s research expenditures in the 2018 fiscal year were $1.442 billion, the fourth largest in the U.S. In fiscal year 2019 Penn received $582.3 million in funding from the National Institutes of Health.
In line with its well-known interdisciplinary tradition, Penn’s research centers often span two or more disciplines. In the 2010–2011 academic year alone, five interdisciplinary research centers were created or substantially expanded; these include the Center for Health-care Financing; the Center for Global Women’s Health at the Nursing School; the $13 million Morris Arboretum’s Horticulture Center; the $15 million Jay H. Baker Retailing Center at Wharton; and the $13 million Translational Research Center at Penn Medicine. With these additions, Penn now counts 165 research centers hosting a research community of over 4,300 faculty and over 1,100 postdoctoral fellows, 5,500 academic support staff and graduate student trainees. To further assist the advancement of interdisciplinary research President Amy Gutmann established the “Penn Integrates Knowledge” title awarded to selected Penn professors “whose research and teaching exemplify the integration of knowledge”. These professors hold endowed professorships and joint appointments between Penn’s schools.
Penn is also among the most prolific producers of doctoral students. With 487 PhDs awarded in 2009, Penn ranks third in the Ivy League, only behind Columbia University and Cornell University (Harvard University did not report data). It also has one of the highest numbers of post-doctoral appointees (933 in number for 2004–2007), ranking third in the Ivy League (behind Harvard and Yale University) and tenth nationally.
In most disciplines Penn professors’ productivity is among the highest in the nation and first in the fields of epidemiology, business, communication studies, comparative literature, languages, information science, criminal justice and criminology, social sciences and sociology. According to the National Research Council nearly three-quarters of Penn’s 41 assessed programs were placed in ranges including the top 10 rankings in their fields, with more than half of these in ranges including the top five rankings in these fields.
Penn’s research tradition has historically been complemented by innovations that shaped higher education. In addition to establishing the first medical school; the first university teaching hospital; the first business school; and the first student union Penn was also the cradle of other significant developments. In 1852, Penn Law was the first law school in the nation to publish a law journal still in existence (then called The American Law Register, now the Penn Law Review, one of the most cited law journals in the world). Under the deanship of William Draper Lewis, the law school was also one of the first schools to emphasize legal teaching by full-time professors instead of practitioners, a system that is still followed today. The Wharton School was home to several pioneering developments in business education. It established the first research center in a business school in 1921 and the first center for entrepreneurship center in 1973 and it regularly introduced novel curricula for which BusinessWeek wrote, “Wharton is on the crest of a wave of reinvention and change in management education”.
Several major scientific discoveries have also taken place at Penn. The university is probably best known as the place where the first general-purpose electronic computer (ENIAC) was born in 1946 at the Moore School of Electrical Engineering. ENIAC UPenn
It was here also where the world’s first spelling and grammar checkers were created, as well as the popular COBOL programming language. Penn can also boast some of the most important discoveries in the field of medicine. The dialysis machine used as an artificial replacement for lost kidney function was conceived and devised out of a pressure cooker by William Inouye while he was still a student at Penn Med; the Rubella and Hepatitis B vaccines were developed at Penn; the discovery of cancer’s link with genes; cognitive therapy; Retin-A (the cream used to treat acne), Resistin; the Philadelphia gene (linked to chronic myelogenous leukemia) and the technology behind PET Scans were all discovered by Penn Med researchers. More recent gene research has led to the discovery of the genes for fragile X syndrome, the most common form of inherited mental retardation; spinal and bulbar muscular atrophy, a disorder marked by progressive muscle wasting; and Charcot–Marie–Tooth disease, a progressive neurodegenerative disease that affects the hands, feet and limbs.
Conductive polymer was also developed at Penn by Alan J. Heeger, Alan MacDiarmid and Hideki Shirakawa, an invention that earned them the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. On faculty since 1965, Ralph L. Brinster developed the scientific basis for in vitro fertilization and the transgenic mouse at Penn and was awarded the National Medal of Science in 2010. The theory of superconductivity was also partly developed at Penn, by then-faculty member John Robert Schrieffer (along with John Bardeen and Leon Cooper). The university has also contributed major advancements in the fields of economics and management. Among the many discoveries are conjoint analysis, widely used as a predictive tool especially in market research; Simon Kuznets’s method of measuring Gross National Product; the Penn effect (the observation that consumer price levels in richer countries are systematically higher than in poorer ones) and the “Wharton Model” developed by Nobel-laureate Lawrence Klein to measure and forecast economic activity. The idea behind Health Maintenance Organizations also belonged to Penn professor Robert Eilers, who put it into practice during then-President Nixon’s health reform in the 1970s.
8.7.23
Ian J. O’Neill
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
818-354-2649
ian.j.oneill@jpl.nasa.gov
Sarah Frazier
NASA Headquarters, Washington
202-358-1112
sarah.frazier@nasa.gov
The Deep Space Optical Communications (DSOC) flight transceiver is inside a large tube-like sunshade and telescope on the Psyche spacecraft, as seen here inside a clean room at JPL. An earlier photo, inset, shows the transceiver assembly before it was integrated with the spacecraft. Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech.
The agency is testing technologies in space and on the ground that could increase bandwidth to transmit more complex science data and even stream video from Mars.
Set to launch this fall, NASA’s Deep Space Optical Communications (DSOC) project will test how lasers could speed up data transmission far beyond the capacity of current radio frequency systems used in space. What’s known as a technology demonstration, DSOC may pave the way for broadband communications that will help support humanity’s next giant leap: when NASA sends astronauts to Mars.
The DSOC near-infrared laser transceiver (a device that can send and receive data) will “piggyback” on NASA’s Psyche mission when it launches to a metal-rich asteroid of the same name in October.
NASA is focused on laser, or optical, communication because of its potential to surpass the bandwidth of radio waves, which the space agency has relied on for more than half a century. Both radio and near-infrared laser communications use electromagnetic waves to transmit data, but near-infrared light packs the data into significantly tighter waves, enabling ground stations to receive more data at once.
“DSOC was designed to demonstrate 10 to 100 times the data-return capacity of state-of-the-art radio systems used in space today,” said Abi Biswas, DSOC’s project technologist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California. “High-bandwidth laser communications for near-Earth orbit and for Moon-orbiting satellites have been proven, but deep space presents new challenges.”
There are more missions than ever headed for deep space, and they promise to produce exponentially more data than past missions in the form of complex science measurements, high-definition images, and video. So experiments like DSOC will play a crucial role in helping NASA advance technologies that can be used routinely by spacecraft and ground systems in the future.
During the first two years of the journey, the transceiver will communicate with two ground stations in Southern California, testing highly sensitive detectors, powerful laser transmitters, and novel methods to decode signals the transceiver sends from deep space.
“DSOC represents the next phase of NASA’s plans for developing revolutionary improved communications technologies that have the capability to increase data transmissions from space – which is critical for the agency’s future ambitions,” said Trudy Kortes, director of the Technology Demonstrations Missions (TDM) program at NASA Headquarters in Washington. “We are thrilled to have the opportunity to test this technology during Psyche’s flight.”
Groundbreaking Technologies
The transceiver riding on Psyche features several new technologies, including a never-before-flown photon-counting camera attached to an 8.6-inch (22-centimeter) aperture telescope that protrudes from the side of the spacecraft. The transceiver will autonomously scan for, and “lock” onto, the high-power near-infrared laser uplink transmitted by the Optical Communication Telescope Laboratory at JPL’s Table Mountain Facility near Wrightwood, California. The laser uplink will also demonstrate sending commands to the transceiver.
“The powerful uplink laser is a critical part of this tech demo for higher rates to spacecraft, and upgrades to our ground systems will enable optical communications for future deep space missions,” said Jason Mitchell, program executive for NASA’s Space Communications and Navigation (SCaN) program at NASA Headquarters.
Once locked onto the uplink laser, the transceiver will locate the 200-inch (5.1-meter) Hale Telescope at Caltech’s Palomar Observatory in San Diego County, California, about 100 miles (130 kilometers) south of Table Mountain.
The transceiver will then use its near-infrared laser to transmit high-rate data down to Palomar. Spacecraft vibrations that might otherwise nudge the laser off target will be dampened by state-of-the-art struts attaching the transceiver to Psyche.
To receive the high-rate downlink laser from the DSOC transceiver, the Hale Telescope has been fitted with a novel superconducting nanowire single photon detector assembly. The assembly is cryogenically cooled so that a single incident laser photon (a quantum particle of light) can be detected and its arrival time recorded. Transmitted as a train of pulses, the laser light must travel more than 200 million miles (300 million kilometers) – the farthest the spacecraft will be during this tech demo – before the faint signals can be detected and processed to extract the information.
“Every component of DSOC exhibits new technology, from the high-power uplink lasers to the pointing system on the transceiver’s telescope and down to the exquisitely sensitive detectors that can count the single photons as they arrive,” said JPL’s Bill Klipstein, the DSOC project manager. “The team even needed to develop new signal-processing techniques to squeeze information out of such weak signals transmitted over vast distances.”
The distances involved pose another challenge for the tech demo: The farther Psyche journeys, the longer the photons will take to reach their destination, creating a lag of up to tens of minutes. The positions of Earth and the spacecraft will be constantly changing while the laser photons travel, so this lag will need to be compensated for.
“Pointing the laser and locking on over millions of miles while dealing with the relative motion of Earth and Psyche poses an exciting challenge for our project,” said Biswas.
More About the Mission
DSOC will demonstrate operations for nearly two years after NASA’s Psyche mission launch while en route to its Mars flyby in 2026. While the DSOC transceiver will be hosted by the Psyche spacecraft, the tech demo will not relay Psyche mission data. The success of each project is evaluated independently of the other.
DSOC is the latest in a series of optical communication demonstrations funded by TDM and SCaN. JPL, a division of Caltech in Pasadena, California, manages DSOC for TDM within NASA’s Space Technology Mission Directorate and SCaN within the agency’s Space Operations Mission Directorate.
The Psyche mission is led by Arizona State University. JPL is responsible for the mission’s overall management, system engineering, integration and test, and mission operations. Psyche is part of NASA’s Discovery Program.
NASA JPL-Caltech is a federally funded research and development center and NASA field center located in the San Gabriel Valley area of Los Angeles County, California, United States. Although the facility has a Pasadena postal address, it is actually headquartered in the city of La Cañada Flintridge, on the northwest border of Pasadena. JPL is managed by the nearby California Institute of Technology for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. The Laboratory’s primary function is the construction and operation of robotic planetary spacecraft, though it also conducts Earth-orbit and astronomy missions. It is also responsible for operating NASA’s Deep Space Network.
President Dwight D. Eisenhower established the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) in 1958 with a distinctly civilian (rather than military) orientation encouraging peaceful applications in space science. The National Aeronautics and Space Act was passed on July 29, 1958, disestablishing NASA’s predecessor, the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA). The new agency became operational on October 1, 1958.
Since that time, most U.S. space exploration efforts have been led by NASA, including the Apollo moon-landing missions, the Skylab space station, and later the Space Shuttle. Currently, NASA is supporting the International Space Station and is overseeing the development of the Orion Multi-Purpose Crew Vehicle and Commercial Crew vehicles. The agency is also responsible for the Launch Services Program (LSP) which provides oversight of launch operations and countdown management for unmanned NASA launches. Most recently, NASA announced a new Space Launch System that it said would take the agency’s astronauts farther into space than ever before and lay the cornerstone for future human space exploration efforts by the U.S.
Astronomers have found that free-floating planets far outnumber those bound to a host star.
An artist’s impression of a free-floating planet, untethered from a star’s gravity, in space. Credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center.
Free-floating planets — dark, isolated orbs roaming the universe unfettered to any host star — don’t just pop into existence in the middle of cosmic nowhere. They probably form the same way other planets do: within the swirling disk of gas and dust surrounding an infant star.
But unlike their planetary siblings, these worlds get violently chucked out of their celestial neighborhoods.
Astronomers had once calculated that billions of planets had gone rogue in the Milky Way. Now, scientists at NASA and Osaka University in Japan are upping the estimate to trillions. Detailed in two papers accepted for publication in The Astronomical Journal, the researchers have deduced that these planets are six times more abundant than worlds orbiting their own suns, and they identified the second Earth-size free floater ever detected.
The existence of wandering worlds orphaned from their star systems has long been known, but poorly understood. Previous findings [Nature [below]] suggested that most of these planets were about the size of Jupiter, our solar system’s most massive planet. But that conclusion garnered a lot of pushback; even scientists who announced it found it surprising.
To better study these rogue worlds, David Bennett, an astronomer at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, and his team used nine years of data from the Microlensing Observations in Astrophysics telescope at the University of Canterbury Mount John Observatory in New Zealand.
Exoplanets were indirectly detected by measuring how their gravity warped and magnified the light arriving from faraway stars behind them, an effect known as “microlensing”.
With help from empirical models, the researchers worked out the spread of the masses for more than 3,500 microlensing events, which included stars, stellar remnants, brown dwarfs and planet candidates. (Data from one of those candidates was compelling enough for the team to claim the discovery of a new rogue Earth.) From this analysis, they estimate that there are about 20 times more free-floating worlds in our Milky Way than stars, with Earth-mass planets 180 times more common than rogue Jupiters.
Microlensing a Rogue Planet.
Oct 4, 2021
This animation illustrates the concept of gravitational microlenzing with a rogue planet — a planet that does not orbit a star. When the rogue planet appears to pass nearly in front of a background source star, the light rays of the source star become bent due to the warped space-time around the foreground planet. This planet is then a virtual magnifying glass, amplifying the brightness of the background source star. Credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center/CI Lab.
The conclusion that most rogue worlds are small makes more sense than the idea that they are Jupiter-size, Dr. Bennett said. That’s because planets are thought to go rogue when two protoplanets slam into each other. The force of the impact is so strong that it knocks one out of the emerging star system altogether.
But planets can be kicked out of their star systems only by larger objects. If most of these stellar orphans were Jupiter-size, a lot of so-called super-Jupiters must be orbiting host stars — but those are scarce. On the other hand, these results suggest that lower mass planets are the ones at risk of ejection.
“So things are dangerous for the Earths,” Dr. Bennett said.
He also said that the abundance of free floaters in the Milky Way suggests that planet-size objects slamming into each other during the formation process “are maybe more common than theorists might have guessed.”
Przemek Mróz, an astronomer at the University of Warsaw who was not involved in the work, said that the group’s results strengthened earlier [Nature (below)] hints [Korea Science (below)] about rogue worlds from observations made with the Optical Gravitational Lensing Experiment and the Korean Microlensing Telescope Network.
“So now we have three independent studies and three independent lines of evidence that low mass free-floating planets are very common in the Milky Way,” he wrote in an email.
There’s still some ambiguity about whether these planets are truly unleashed, or just cast out to wide enough orbits that scientists can’t link them to a host star. Dr. Mróz thinks the observed population probably includes a mix of both, but it’ll be difficult to deduce the relative numbers of each with microlensing measurements alone.
The new studies’ astronomers are looking forward to even better free-floating planet data taken with the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, a NASA mission set to launch in 2027, which could spot hundreds of rogue Earths.
Combined with data from the European Space Agency’s Euclid Telescope, or well-positioned observatories on the ground, scientists will be able to measure the mass more directly, with less reliance on models.
Could any of these planets be habitable? Possibly, Dr. Bennett surmised, explaining that they’d be dark without a host star, but not necessarily frigid. Hydrogen in a planet’s atmosphere could act like a greenhouse and trap heat emanating from its interior — which is what sustains microbial life in deep sea vents on Earth.
But for now, searching for life on these lone worlds is out of reach. “Maybe they’ll have a method to do it in a hundred years,” Dr. Bennett said. “But scientists now are looking for things that we can actually do.”
The team didn’t look beyond the bounds of the Milky Way. “But we expect that other galaxies are pretty similar,” Dr. Bennett said — meaning that these outcasts might be sprinkled across our entire universe.
Light curves of the short timescale microlensing candidates with tE < 1 day — astro-ph.EP Credit: https://astrobiology.com
Currently, three survey groups, the Microlensing Observations in Astrophysics collaboration (MOA, Bond et al.2001; Sumi et al. 2003), the Optical Gravitational Lensing Experiment (OGLE, Udalski et al. 1994, 2015), and the Korea Microlensing Telescope Network (KMT-Net, Kim et al. 2010, 2016), are conducting wide-field
high-cadence surveys toward the Galactic bulge.
Artist’s impression of the Gaia spacecraft detecting artificial signals from a distant star system. In this synchronization scheme, the star system’s inhabitants send the signal shortly after witnessing a supernova, which is also seen by telescopes on Earth. Credit: Danielle Futselaar / Breakthrough Listen
As an astrometry mission, Gaia aims to gather data on the positions, proper motion, and velocity of stars, exoplanets, and objects in the Milky Way and tens of thousands of neighboring galaxies. By the end of its primary mission (scheduled to end in 2025), Gaia will have observed an estimated 1 billion astronomical objects, leading to the creation of the most precise 3D space catalog ever made.
To date, the ESA has conducted three data releases from the Gaia mission, the latest (DR3) released in June 2022. In addition to the breakthroughs these releases have allowed, scientists are finding additional applications for this astrometric data. In a recent study [The Astronomical Journal [below]], a team of astronomers suggested that the variable star catalog from the Gaia Data Release 3 could be used to assist in the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI). By synchronizing the search for transmissions with conspicuous events (like a supernova!), scientists could narrow the search for extraterrestrial transmissions.
The study was led by Andy Nilipour, an undergraduate student at the Yale University Department of Astronomy. He was joined by James R.A. Davenport, a Research Scientist at the University of Washington, Seattle; Adjunct Senior Astronomer Steve Croft from the Radio Astronomy Lab and the SETI Institute at UC Berkeley; and Andrew Siemion, the Bernard M. Oliver Chair for SETI Qualification at UC Berkeley, the Jodrell Bank Center for Astrophysics (JBCA) at the University of Manchester, and the Institute of Space Sciences and Astronomy at the University of Malta.
This study, which was recently published in The Astronomical Journal [below], was Nilipour’s first academic study. As he explained in an interview with Yale News, “My two mentors, Steve Croft, and James Davenport, chose this for me, the idea of developing a geometric technique for constraining [technosignature] searches. It’s probably the biggest challenge in SETI right now because there are so many possibilities for the location of a transmission and the nature of the signal.”
Put simply, “technosignatures” are evidence of activity that unambiguously demonstrates the presence of an advanced technological civilization. To date, the vast majority of SETI experiments have searched for radio signals since the technology is known to be viable and radiowaves propagate well through space—the most advanced and comprehensive being Breakthrough Listen. These experiments also consisted of listening to various stars for a set period in the hopes of discerning radio signals coming from orbiting planets. But in recent years, scientists have expanded the range of potential technosignatures and considered other methods as well.
The “SETI ellipsoid” is an egg-shaped zone of space where alien civilizations would have had enough time to observe an astronomical event and then send out a signal that could be observed from Earth. Credit: Davenport et al. (2022)
Said Nilipour, “There are lots of thoughts about what technosignatures might look like. The most common form that we look for is narrowband radio emission, because, based on our sample size of human technology, this seems to be something that a technological civilization should be producing. Other forms might be laser emission, close encounters of stars at high velocities, and emission from a star suddenly and dramatically decreasing.”
For their study, Nilipour and his team theorized that an intelligent civilization would understand how difficult it is to monitor all the space surrounding their planet in every possible mode—radio, optical, infrared, ultraviolet, X-ray, gamma-ray, etc. As such, they might opt to time their signals of greeting (fingers crossed!) with a conspicuous astrophysical event that would draw the attention of observers—i.e., supernovae. Nilipour began working on this theory as part of a summer undergraduate program offered by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the Breakthrough Listen Initiative at the Berkeley SETI Research Center.
As a first step, Nilipour and his colleagues chose four historical supernovae from the past 1,000 years and examined how long it took light from their explosions to reach Earth. As Nilipour explained, “We merged two searching frameworks—the ellipsoid method, which synchronizes signals to a conspicuous astronomical event, and the Seto method, which is tied to geometric angles and not distance—and applied them to four events.
“We chose four historically documented supernovae from the years 1054, 1572, 1604, and 1987, respectively. In this case, a supernova would act like a lighthouse, a common focal point for the sender of the signal and the receiver of the signal—us.”
They determined that the light caused by these four events took 6,300 years, 8,970 years, 16,600 years, and 168,000 years to reach Earth (respectively). They then compared these results to light signals from over 10 million stars recorded by the Gaia observatory that were included in the DR3 catalog. This revealed 465 stars whose light took the same amount of time to reach Earth and 403 stars whose light signals traveled to Earth from an advantageous angle in relation to these supernovae. While none of the 868 systems yielded evidence of technosignatures, their results have provided important constraints for future searches.
Artist’s impression of Green Bank Telescope connected to a machine learning network. Credit: Danielle Futselaar/ Breakthrough Listen.
As Nilipour indicated, their method can also be used to search through other archival data to tease out possible signs of technosignatures.
“Finding a technosignature would have been incredible, but this really was more about showing a methodology that we can use in the future. What we’ve done here can be applied to additional Gaia data, to data from TESS [the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite], and to other data as it becomes available.
We’re currently running the same type of analysis using a new supernova in the galaxy Messsier 101 that became visible in May of this year, which is the closest supernova in over a decade.”
Given the number of stars in our galaxy alone, the amount of background noise, the time-sensitive nature of transmissions, and (as if that wasn’t enough) the likelihood of obtaining false positives, searching for potential technosignatures is an extremely daunting task. Were it possible to monitor every sector of the sky—indefinitely and in multiple wavelengths simultaneously—it would just be a matter of time before transmissions could be heard (assuming anyone out there was transmitting). Unfortunately, we don’t have the time or the resources for such thorough all-sky coverage.
Herein lies the value of research like this, which effectively narrows the search by exploring different types of technosignatures, frequency ranges, and locations in the night sky. Little by little, SETI researchers are improving the odds of an unambiguous detection that can be confirmed by follow-up studies. If there is a needle to be found in the cosmic haystack, we will find it sooner or later. Despite the limits imposed on us by such a large universe and so many possibilities, it is still just a matter of time.
8.3.23
Tony Allen
tony.allen@unlv.edu
(702) 895-0893
Superfast changes to the intensity of a jet blasting out from a small black hole have been detected for the first time.
An illustration of a stellar mass black hole blasting out a jet of super-energetic material. (Image credit: Wei Wang,/Wuhan University)
Black holes are the most mysterious objects in the universe, with features that sound like they come straight from a sci-fi movie.
Stellar-mass black holes with masses of roughly 10 suns, for example, reveal their existence by eating materials from their companion stars. And in some instances, supermassive black holes accumulate at the center of some galaxies to form bright compact regions known as quasars with masses equal to millions to billions of our sun. A subset of accreting stellar-mass black holes that can launch jets of highly magnetized plasma are called microquasars.
An international team of scientists, including UNLV astrophysicist Bing Zhang, reports in the July 26 issue of Nature [below] a dedicated observational campaign on the Galactic microquasar dubbed GRS 1915+105. The team revealed features of a microquasar system that have never before been seen.
The feature takes the form of periodic changes in the jet occurring within a fraction of a second that have been detected by the Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical radio Telescope (FAST) in China.
Astronomers know that the strange blinking object, called GRS 1915+105, consists of a regular star orbiting a stellar black hole, a black hole that was born after a massive star had died. As the star orbits the black hole, some of its material gets sucked into the cosmic monster, which fails to swallow all of the material and instead accelerates some of it into the jet that appears to squirt from its poles.
The team behind the observation thinks that the measured changes in the jet’s energy could be due to the fact that the black hole’s rotation isn’t aligned with its accretion disk, the disk of orbiting matter it is feasting on. That could be causing the jet to wobble almost like a cosmic spinning top. When the jet points away, its energy drops. A fraction of a second later, it returns to normal when the system rotates back.
“The peculiar signal has a rough period of 0.2 seconds, or a frequency of about 5 Hertz,” Wei Wang, a professor of astrophysics at Wuhan University in China and the lead author of the research, said in a statement. “Such a signal does not always exist and only shows up under special physical conditions. Our team was lucky enough to catch the signal twice — in January 2021 and June 2022, respectively.”
“The peculiar QPO signal has a rough period of 0.2 seconds, or a frequency of about 5 Hertz,” said Wei Wang, a professor with China’s Wuhan University who led the team that made the discovery. “Such a signal does not always exist and only shows up under special physical conditions. Our team was lucky enough to catch the signal twice — in January 2021 and June 2022, respectively.”
According to UNLV’s Zhang, director of the Nevada Center for Astrophysics and one of the study’s corresponding authors, this unique feature may provide the first evidence of activity from a “jet” launched by a Galactic stellar-mass black hole. Under certain conditions, some black hole binary systems launch a jet — a mix of parallel beams of charged matter and a magnetic field that moves with a swiftness approaching the speed of light.
“In accreting black hole systems, X-rays usually probe the accretion disk around the black hole while radio emission usually probes the jet launched from the disk and the black hole,” said Zhang. “The detailed mechanism to induce temporal modulation in a relativistic jet is not identified, but one plausible mechanism would be that the jet is underlying precession, which means the jet direction is regularly pointing towards different directions and returns to the original direction once every about 0.2 seconds.”
Zhang said that a misalignment between the spin axis of the black hole and its accretion disk (extremely hot, bright spinning gasses surrounding the black hole) could cause this effect, which is a natural consequence of a dragging of spacetime near a rapidly spinning black hole.
“Other possibilities exist, though, and continued observations of this and other Galactic microquasar sources will bring more clues to understand these mysterious QPO signals,” said Zhang.
Powerful relativistic jets are one of the ubiquitous features of accreting black holes in all scales [1*],[2],[3]. GRS 1915 + 105 is a well-known fast-spinning black-hole X-ray binary [4] with a relativistic jet, termed a ‘microquasar’, as indicated by its superluminal motion of radio emission [5],[6]. It has exhibited persistent X-ray activity over the last 30 years, with quasiperiodic oscillations of approximately 1–10 Hz (refs. [7],[8],[9]) and 34 and 67 Hz in the X-ray band10. These oscillations probably originate in the inner accretion disk, but other origins have been considered11. Radio observations found variable light curves with quasiperiodic flares or oscillations with periods of approximately 20–50 min (refs. [12],[13],[14]). Here we report two instances of approximately 5-Hz transient periodic oscillation features from the source detected in the 1.05- to 1.45-GHz radio band that occurred in January 2021 and June 2022. Circular polarization was also observed during the oscillation phase.
*See the science paper for cited references if you have credentials.
Subsecond periodic radio oscillations in a microquasar.
The University of Nevada-Las Vegas is a public land-grant research university in Paradise, Nevada. The 332-acre (134 ha) campus is about 1.6 mi (2.6 km) east of the Las Vegas Strip. It was formerly part of the University of Nevada from 1957 to 1969. It includes the Shadow Lane Campus, just east of the University Medical Center of Southern Nevada, which houses both School of Medicine and School of Dental Medicine. UNLV’s law school, the William S. Boyd School of Law, is the only law school in the state.
It is classified among “R1: Doctoral Universities – Very high research activity”. According to the National Science Foundation, UNLV spent $83 million on research and development in 2018, ranking it 165th in the nation.
UNLV offers more than 350 bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral degrees in varying fields, which are taught by 850 faculty members.
Academic schools, colleges and divisions:
School of Integrated Health Sciences
School of Architecture
School of Public Health
College of Education
Howard R. Hughes College of Engineering
College of Fine Arts
Graduate College
Honors College
William F. Harrah College of Hospitality
Hank Greenspun School of Journalism & Media Studies
College of Liberal Arts
School of Music
College of Sciences
Greenspun College of Urban Affairs
School of Public Policy and Leadership
School of Environment and Public Affairs
School of Social Work
Department of Communication Studies
Department of Criminal Justice
Professional schools:
Kirk Kerkorian School of Medicine
Lee Business School
School of Dental Medicine
School of Nursing
William S. Boyd School of Law
UNLV research and economic development activities increased for the fourth consecutive year, according to the fiscal-year-end report from the Division of Research and Economic Development. Research awards rose by 7.5 percent to nearly $34.5 million, and proposals increased by two percent. Research expenditures in FY18 totaled $37 million.
The College of Sciences received the largest amount of award funding among the colleges once again this fiscal year: nearly $15 million through more than 100 awards. Engineering followed with roughly $7.6 million in awards. The College of Education posted the largest percentage gain in award funding in FY16 with a nearly 47% increase from $1,776,332 in FY15 to $2,609,366 in FY16.
UNLV’s economic development activities continue to grow. Sixty-one patents were filed in FY16, an increase of 17% over FY15, and licensing revenue doubled from $126,242 in FY15 to $252,309 in FY16.
Another measure of university research activity is the number of doctoral degrees conferred, as doctoral programs require a strong research component culminating in the doctoral dissertation. UNLV doctoral conferrals increased nearly 13% in FY16 to 166 degrees conferred. For the 2017–2018 school year, 163 doctoral degrees were conferred.
According to the QS World University Rankings, William F. Harrah College of Hospitality’s Hotel Administration program is ranked No. 2 in the world in 2020.
Lee Business School’s part-time MBA program is ranked in the top 28% in U.S. News & World Report’s 2014 ranking of best business graduate programs.
The Atlantic recognized UNLV’s English department as having one of the nation’s most innovative master of fine arts programs and one of the top-five doctoral programs in creative writing.
Down Beat magazine, the internationally recognized industry standard trade publication for jazz music, recognized the work of the 2010 UNLV Jazz Ensemble as “Outstanding Large Jazz Ensemble Performance” among graduate college-level jazz bands in their annual Student Music Award issue of that year.
In 2018, UNLV surpassed New York University as the most diverse university for undergraduates according to U.S. News & World Report.
NGC 520, a pair of colliding spiral galaxies in the constellation Pisces. Credit: Roberto Colombari/Stocktrek Images/Getty.
Astronomers at Melbourne’s Swinburne University of Technology have developed a new look at how galaxies and their central supermassive black holes co-evolve.
Researchers have previously assumed that central black holes in elliptical-shaped galaxies – the largest galaxies in the universe – increase in mass linearly with the size of the galaxy. For example, it was believed that an elliptical galaxy with two times the stellar mass of a smaller galaxy should also have a central black hole twice as massive.
Overall, supermassive black holes in the centres of elliptical galaxies have been assumed to make up about 0.2% of the galaxy’s total mass.
For a quarter century, computer simulations aimed at illuminating how these central black holes and elliptical galaxies evolve together have used this model.
But the Swinburne researchers’ new observations revealed not a linear growth of central black holes with elliptical galaxy size, but “quadratic” growth. This means that an elliptical galaxy with twice as much stellar matter will have a central black hole four times bigger. A galaxy with 10 times greater stellar mass will see a 100-fold increase in the size of the supermassive black hole.
The findings are published in the MNRAS [below].
“The black holes are off their leash,” says author Professor Alister Graham.
The four largest galaxies in the known universe are elliptical. The largest, IC 1101, is located a billion light-years from Earth. Home to 100 trillion stars, IC 1101 has a radius of about 2 million light-years (compared to the Milky Way, which has a radius of just 53,000 light years). This means that, if IC 1101 were located where the Milky Way is, it would engulf our nearest large neighbour galaxy Andromeda.
Because elliptical galaxies can be so large, their central black holes are also massive.
This is seen in the nearby elliptical galaxy Messier 87 (M87). In 2019, M87’s central [M87*] black hole became the first black hole to be directly imaged; it’s about 500 million times the mass of our Sun.
Elliptical galaxy central black holes are regularly billions of times larger than the Sun.
Graham discovered quadratic growth among supermassive black holes in the elliptical-shaped swarm of stars that make up the centres of spiral galaxies (like the Milky Way). However, it was assumed that quadratic growth wasn’t a feature of central black holes of elliptical galaxies.
The astronomers found this quadratic relationship between elliptical galaxy size and central black hole size by analysing 100 galaxies imaged at infrared wavelengths by NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope.
The discovery changes our understanding of how galaxies and black holes co-evolve.
Many of the galaxies previously thought to be purely elliptical actually possess a huge disc of stars. The quadratic mass scaling became evident when these discs were taken into account. The research suggests two types of galaxy: elliptical and “spiral-less” disc galaxies.
The researchers believe that colliding galaxies throw stars into chaotic orbits above and below the neat circular orbits seen in spiral galaxies. This builds a “bulge”. Initially, these will develop into galaxies with prominent bulges and a dusty spiral-less disc. After some time, the bulge dominates and a pure elliptical galaxy is born.
Figure 1.
Morphologically-aware Mbh–M*,sph diagram. The ten cD and BCG (including the dusty S0 galaxy NGC 1316 and the ES,e galaxy NGC 1275), along with NGC 3377 and NGC 6251, were excluded from the fit to the (remaining) 24 E/ES,e galaxies (right-most solid red line: equation 1). The one BCG above this line is NGC 4486. The (non-BCG) E galaxy with the highest BH mass is NGC 1600. The dashed red line represents the BCG. The lines for the (S0 and S) disc galaxies have come from (Graham 2023b). Using the S0 galaxy ‘dust bins’ (Graham 2023b), the left-most red solid line represents S0 galaxies without visible signs of dust (dust = N), while the orange dashed line additionally includes S0 galaxies with only a nuclear dust disc or ring (dust = n). The green dashed line is the orange dashed line shifted horizontally by an arbitrary log (3.5) ≈ 0.54 dex, while the solid green line is a fit to the dusty (dust = Y) S0 galaxies, excluding those with only a little widespread dust (dust = y). The blue line represents the S galaxy data. Labelled galaxies were excluded from the Bayesian analyses. From left to right, the logarithmic slopes are: 2.39 ± 0.81 (red line); 2.70 ± 0.77 (dashed orange line); 2.27 ± 0.48 (blue line); 3.69 ± 1.51 (solid green line); 2.70 ± 0.77 (dashed green line); and 2.00 ± 0.25 (red solid and dashed line). Full equations are in Table 1, and the arrows are explained* in the main text.
*See the science paper for instructive material with images if you have the necessary credentials.
See the science paper for further instructive material with images.
The Swinburne University of Technology (AU) is an Australian public university based in Melbourne, Victoria. It was founded in 1908 as the Eastern Suburbs Technical College by George Swinburne in order to serve those without access to further education in Melbourne’s eastern suburbs. Its main campus is located in Hawthorn, a suburb of Melbourne which is located 7.5 km from the Melbourne central business district.
In addition to its main Hawthorn campus, Swinburne has campuses in the Melbourne metropolitan area at Wantirna and Croydon as well as a campus in Sarawak, Malaysia.
In the 2016 QS World University Rankings, Swinburne was ranked 32nd for art and design, making it one of the top art and design schools in Australia and the world.
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A new Yale study proposes a way that collisions between asteroids might lead to the formation of metal asteroids able to generate and record magnetism.
This illustration depicts the metal-rich asteroid Psyche, which is located in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. Image Credit: Peter Rubin/ASU; NASA/JPL-Caltech.
Yale researchers may have solved a longstanding puzzle as to why certain metallic meteorites show traces of a magnetic field — a finding that may shed light on the formation of magnetic dynamos at the core of planets.
Planetary magnetism is key to understanding both the internal structure and evolution of many celestial bodies. The cores of Earth, Mercury, and two of Jupiter’s moons, Ganymede and Io, for example, all generate detectable magnetic fields. And there are traces of ancient magnetism found on Mars and Earth’s moon.
But there are also meteorites — small space rocks that have fallen to Earth — that contain hints of magnetism. Scientists say some iron meteorites bear the remnants of an internally-generated magnetic field — which shouldn’t be possible. Although iron meteorites are thought to represent the metallic cores of asteroids (small planetary bodies), these cores are not expected to have the highly specific internal characteristics necessary to simultaneously generate and record magnetism.
In a new study, Yale scientists Zhongtian Zhang and David Bercovici propose that under certain conditions, collisions between asteroids can lead to the formation of metal asteroids that can generate a magnetic field and record the magnetism by their own materials. Small fragments of these asteroids, with the traces of magnetism, could fall to Earth as meteorites.
The study appears in the journal PNAS [below].
“I had been aware of this puzzle for some time,” said Zhang, a graduate student in Yale’s Department of Earth & Planetary Sciences and first author of the study. “When I first came to Yale and discussed potential research directions with Dave, one of the papers he sent me was about the observation of paleomagnetism in iron meteorites.”
Several years later, Zhang was conducting research on what are known as “rubble-pile” asteroids, which are created when gravitational forces cause the fragments of asteroid collisions to re-form in new combinations.
That work inspired Zhang and Bercovici to consider the question of whether the rubble pile phenomenon might be relevant to the generation of a magnetic field.
The researchers’ modeling suggests that after an asteroid collision, it is possible for new, iron-heavy asteroids to form with a cold, rubble-pile inner core surrounded by a warmer liquid outer layer. When the colder core begins to draw heat from the outer layer, and lighter elements such as sulphur are released, they report, it initiates convection — which in turn creates a magnetic field.
According to their model, this sort of dynamo could generate a magnetic field for several million years, which would be long enough for its presence to be detected in iron meteorites by scientists billions of years later.
“There are several pieces to this puzzle for which Zhongtian has devised a creative and clever solution,” said Bercovici, the Frederick William Beinecke Professor of Earth & Planetary Sciences in Yale’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences.
“For instance, the idea of a rubble-pile core is really like dropping ice cubes into a molten metal,” Bercovici said. “They can’t be too big or too small. But there is an optimum size that is just small enough to cool in space, but also sink fast enough into the melted metal and pile up in the center to make an inner core like Earth’s, at least for a little while.”
Funding for the research came from a NASA Discovery Mission grant awarded to Arizona State University, the lead institution for the Psyche mission. Bercovici is a co-investigator for the mission.
Abstract
Paleomagnetic records of iron meteorites of the IVA group suggest that their parent body (an inward-solidified metal asteroid) possessed an internal magnetic field. The origin of this magnetism is enigmatic because inward solidification typically leads to light element release from the top of the liquid, which depresses convection and dynamo activity. Here, we propose a possible scenario to help resolve this paradox. The formation of a metal asteroid must involve a disruptive, mantle-stripping collision and the reaccretion of metal fragments. We hypothesize that a small portion of metal fragments may have substantially cooled before being reaccreted. These fragments could have formed a cold, rubble-pile inner core, which extracted heat from the liquid layer, leading to solidification and light element expulsion at the inner core boundary to power a dynamo. In the portions of the inward-growing crust that cooled below the remanence acquisition temperature, the magnetic field could be recorded.
The Arizona State University is a public research university in the Phoenix metropolitan area. Founded in 1885 by the 13th Arizona Territorial Legislature, ASU is one of the largest public universities by enrollment in the U.S.
Arizona State is now a member of the Association of American Universities [https://www.aau.edu/]
One of three universities governed by the Arizona Board of Regents, The Arizona State University is a member of the Universities Research Association and classified among “R1: Doctoral Universities – Very High Research Activity.” The Arizona State University has nearly 150,000 students attending classes, with more than 38,000 students attending online, and 90,000 undergraduates and more nearly 20,000 postgraduates across its five campuses and four regional learning centers throughout Arizona. The Arizona State University offers 350 degree options from its 17 colleges and more than 170 cross-discipline centers and institutes for undergraduates students, as well as more than 400 graduate degree and certificate programs. The Arizona State Sun Devils compete in 26 varsity-level sports in the NCAA Division I Pac-12 Conference and is home to over 1,100 registered student organizations.
The Arizona State University ‘s charter, approved by the board of regents in 2014, is based on the New American University model created by The Arizona State University President Michael M. Crow upon his appointment as the institution’s 16th president in 2002. It defines The Arizona State University as “a comprehensive public research university, measured not by whom it excludes, but rather by whom it includes and how they succeed; advancing research and discovery of public value; and assuming fundamental responsibility for the economic, social, cultural and overall health of the communities it serves.” The model is widely credited with boosting The Arizona State University ‘s acceptance rate and increasing class size.
The university’s faculty of more than 4,700 scholars has included 5 Nobel laureates, 6 Pulitzer Prize winners, 4 MacArthur Fellows, and 19 National Academy of Sciences members. Additionally, among the faculty are 180 Fulbright Program American Scholars, 72 National Endowment for the Humanities fellows, 38 American Council of Learned Societies fellows, 36 members of the Guggenheim Fellowship, 21 members of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 3 members of National Academy of Inventors, 9 National Academy of Engineering members and 3 National Academy of Medicine members. The National Academies has bestowed “highly prestigious” recognition on 227 Arizona State University faculty members.
History
The Arizona State University was established as the Territorial Normal School at Tempe on March 12, 1885, when the 13th Arizona Territorial Legislature passed an act to create a normal school to train teachers for the Arizona Territory. The campus consisted of a single, four-room schoolhouse on a 20-acre plot largely donated by Tempe residents George and Martha Wilson. Classes began with 33 students on February 8, 1886. The curriculum evolved over the years and the name was changed several times; the institution was also known as Tempe Normal School of Arizona (1889–1903), Tempe Normal School (1903–1925), Tempe State Teachers College (1925–1929), Arizona State Teachers College (1929–1945), Arizona State College (1945–1958) and, by a 2–1 margin of the state’s voters, The Arizona State University in 1958.
In 1923, the school stopped offering high school courses and added a high school diploma to the admissions requirements. In 1925, the school became the Tempe State Teachers College and offered four-year Bachelor of Education degrees as well as two-year teaching certificates. In 1929, the 9th Arizona State Legislature authorized Bachelor of Arts in Education degrees as well, and the school was renamed The Arizona State Teachers College. Under the 30-year tenure of president Arthur John Matthews (1900–1930), the school was given all-college student status. The first dormitories built in the state were constructed under his supervision in 1902. Of the 18 buildings constructed while Matthews was president, six are still in use. Matthews envisioned an “evergreen campus,” with many shrubs brought to the campus, and implemented the planting of 110 Mexican Fan Palms on what is now known as Palm Walk, a century-old landmark of the Tempe campus.
During the Great Depression, Ralph Waldo Swetman was hired to succeed President Matthews, coming to The Arizona State Teachers College in 1930 from The Humboldt State Teachers College where he had served as president. He served a three-year term, during which he focused on improving teacher-training programs. During his tenure, enrollment at the college doubled, topping the 1,000 mark for the first time. Matthews also conceived of a self-supported summer session at the school at The Arizona State Teachers College, a first for the school.
1930–1989
In 1933, Grady Gammage, then president of The Arizona State Teachers College at Flagstaff, became president of The Arizona State Teachers College at Tempe, beginning a tenure that would last for nearly 28 years, second only to Swetman’s 30 years at the college’s helm. Like President Arthur John Matthews before him, Gammage oversaw the construction of several buildings on the Tempe campus. He also guided the development of the university’s graduate programs; the first Master of Arts in Education was awarded in 1938, the first Doctor of Education degree in 1954 and 10 non-teaching master’s degrees were approved by the Arizona Board of Regents in 1956. During his presidency, the school’s name was changed to Arizona State College in 1945, and finally to The Arizona State University in 1958. At the time, two other names were considered: Tempe University and State University at Tempe. Among Gammage’s greatest achievements in Tempe was the Frank Lloyd Wright-designed construction of what is Grady Gammage Memorial Auditorium/ASU Gammage. One of the university’s hallmark buildings, Arizona State University Gammage was completed in 1964, five years after the president’s (and Wright’s) death.
Gammage was succeeded by Harold D. Richardson, who had served the school earlier in a variety of roles beginning in 1939, including director of graduate studies, college registrar, dean of instruction, dean of the College of Education and academic vice president. Although filling the role of acting president of the university for just nine months (Dec. 1959 to Sept. 1960), Richardson laid the groundwork for the future recruitment and appointment of well-credentialed research science faculty.
By the 1960s, under G. Homer Durham, the university’s 11th president, The Arizona State University began to expand its curriculum by establishing several new colleges and, in 1961, the Arizona Board of Regents authorized doctoral degree programs in six fields, including Doctor of Philosophy. By the end of his nine-year tenure, The Arizona State University had more than doubled enrollment, reporting 23,000 in 1969.
The next three presidents—Harry K. Newburn (1969–71), John W. Schwada (1971–81) and J. Russell Nelson (1981–89), including and Interim President Richard Peck (1989), led the university to increased academic stature, the establishment of The Arizona State University West campus in 1984 and its subsequent construction in 1986, a focus on computer-assisted learning and research, and rising enrollment.
1990–present
Under the leadership of Lattie F. Coor, president from 1990 to 2002, The Arizona State University grew through the creation of the Polytechnic campus and extended education sites. Increased commitment to diversity, quality in undergraduate education, research, and economic development occurred over his 12-year tenure. Part of Coor’s legacy to the university was a successful fundraising campaign: through private donations, more than $500 million was invested in areas that would significantly impact the future of The Arizona State University. Among the campaign’s achievements were the naming and endowing of Barrett, The Honors College, and the Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts; the creation of many new endowed faculty positions; and hundreds of new scholarships and fellowships.
In 2002, Michael M. Crow became the university’s 16th president. At his inauguration, he outlined his vision for transforming The Arizona State University into a “New American University”—one that would be open and inclusive, and set a goal for the university to meet Association of American Universities criteria and to become a member. Crow initiated the idea of transforming The Arizona State University into “One university in many places”—a single institution comprising several campuses, sharing students, faculty, staff and accreditation. Subsequent reorganizations combined academic departments, consolidated colleges and schools, and reduced staff and administration as the university expanded its West and Polytechnic campuses. The Arizona State University’s Downtown Phoenix campus was also expanded, with several colleges and schools relocating there. The university established learning centers throughout the state, including The Arizona State University Colleges at Lake Havasu City and programs in Thatcher, Yuma, and Tucson. Students at these centers can choose from several Arizona State University degree and certificate programs.
During Crow’s tenure, and aided by hundreds of millions of dollars in donations, The Arizona State University began a years-long research facility capital building effort that led to the establishment of the Biodesign Institute at The Arizona State University, the Julie Ann Wrigley Global Institute of Sustainability, and several large interdisciplinary research buildings. Along with the research facilities, the university faculty was expanded, including the addition of five Nobel Laureates. Since 2002, the university’s research expenditures have tripled and more than 1.5 million square feet of space has been added to the university’s research facilities.
The economic downturn that began in 2008 took a particularly hard toll on Arizona, resulting in large cuts to The Arizona State University ‘s budget. In response to these cuts, The Arizona State University capped enrollment, closed some four dozen academic programs, combined academic departments, consolidated colleges and schools, and reduced university faculty, staff and administrators; however, with an economic recovery underway in 2011, the university continued its campaign to expand the West and Polytechnic Campuses, and establish a low-cost, teaching-focused extension campus in Lake Havasu City.
As of 2011, an article in Slate reported that, “the bottom line looks good,” noting that:
“Since Crow’s arrival, The Arizona State University’s research funding has almost tripled to nearly $350 million. Degree production has increased by 45 percent. And thanks to an ambitious aid program, enrollment of students from Arizona families below poverty is up 647 percent.”
In 2015, the Thunderbird School of Global Management became the fifth Arizona State University campus, as the Thunderbird School of Global Management at The Arizona State University. Partnerships for education and research with Mayo Clinic established collaborative degree programs in health care and law, and shared administrator positions, laboratories and classes at the Mayo Clinic Arizona campus.
The Beus Center for Law and Society, the new home of The Arizona State University’s Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law, opened in fall 2016 on the Downtown Phoenix campus, relocating faculty and students from the Tempe campus to the state capital.
The Graduate Program offers students the opportunity to study and do research in a wide range of cutting-edge and cross-disciplinary areas. The department accepts applications for our Ph.D. program (note that we have no Masters program) from various fields and majors. In addition to geoscience majors, we are interested in students from various disciplines including physics, chemistry, biology, mathematics, astronomy and engineering.
The Earth and Planetary Sciences Undergraduate Program consists of five alternative tracks, defined by discipline. The Bachelor of Arts (B.A.) track in Geology and Natural Resources is designed for students aiming for a general overview of the Earth sciences. The B.A. track is more lenient on prerequisites (mathematics in particular) and total number of courses, and is particularly appropriate for students pursuing a double major or seeking a career in law, business, government, or environmental fields. The Bachelor of Science (B.S.) program is designed to prepare students for professional careers in the Earth sciences. It has prerequisites in math, chemistry, and physics or biology, and requires about 10 courses beyond those prerequisites, plus a senior project. Details vary among the four tracks, which are named: (1) atmosphere, ocean, and climate, (2) environmental and energy geoscience, (3) paleontology and geobiology, and (4) solid Earth sciences.
Yale University is a private Ivy League research university in New Haven, Connecticut. Founded in 1701 as the Collegiate School, it is the third-oldest institution of higher education in the United States and one of the nine Colonial Colleges chartered before the American Revolution. The Collegiate School was renamed Yale College in 1718 to honor the school’s largest private benefactor for the first century of its existence, Elihu Yale. Yale University is consistently ranked as one of the top universities and is considered one of the most prestigious in the nation.
Chartered by Connecticut Colony, the Collegiate School was established in 1701 by clergy to educate Congregational ministers before moving to New Haven in 1716. Originally restricted to theology and sacred languages, the curriculum began to incorporate humanities and sciences by the time of the American Revolution. In the 19th century, the college expanded into graduate and professional instruction, awarding the first PhD in the United States in 1861 and organizing as a university in 1887. Yale’s faculty and student populations grew after 1890 with rapid expansion of the physical campus and scientific research.
Yale is organized into fourteen constituent schools: the original undergraduate college, the Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences and twelve professional schools. While the university is governed by the Yale Corporation, each school’s faculty oversees its curriculum and degree programs. In addition to a central campus in downtown New Haven, the university owns athletic facilities in western New Haven, a campus in West Haven, Connecticut, and forests and nature preserves throughout New England. As of June 2020, the university’s endowment was valued at $31.1 billion, the second largest of any educational institution. The Yale University Library, serving all constituent schools, holds more than 15 million volumes and is the third-largest academic library in the United States. Students compete in intercollegiate sports as the Yale Bulldogs in the NCAA Division I – Ivy League.
As of October 2020, 65 Nobel laureates, five Fields Medalists, four Abel Prize laureates, and three Turing award winners have been affiliated with Yale University. In addition, Yale has graduated many notable alumni, including five U.S. Presidents, 19 U.S. Supreme Court Justices, 31 living billionaires, and many heads of state. Hundreds of members of Congress and many U.S. diplomats, 78 MacArthur Fellows, 252 Rhodes Scholars, 123 Marshall Scholars, and nine Mitchell Scholars have been affiliated with the university.
Research
Yale is a member of the Association of American Universities and is classified among “R1: Doctoral Universities – Very high research activity”. According to the National Science Foundation , Yale spent $990 million on research and development in 2018, ranking it 15th in the nation.
Yale’s English and Comparative Literature departments were part of the New Criticism movement. Of the New Critics, Robert Penn Warren, W.K. Wimsatt, and Cleanth Brooks were all Yale faculty. Later, the Yale Comparative literature department became a center of American deconstruction. Jacques Derrida, the father of deconstruction, taught at the Department of Comparative Literature from the late seventies to mid-1980s. Several other Yale faculty members were also associated with deconstruction, forming the so-called “Yale School”. These included Paul de Man who taught in the Departments of Comparative Literature and French, J. Hillis Miller, Geoffrey Hartman (both taught in the Departments of English and Comparative Literature), and Harold Bloom (English), whose theoretical position was always somewhat specific, and who ultimately took a very different path from the rest of this group. Yale’s history department has also originated important intellectual trends. Historians C. Vann Woodward and David Brion Davis are credited with beginning in the 1960s and 1970s an important stream of southern historians; likewise, David Montgomery, a labor historian, advised many of the current generation of labor historians in the country. Yale’s Music School and Department fostered the growth of Music Theory in the latter half of the 20th century. The Journal of Music Theory was founded there in 1957; Allen Forte and David Lewin were influential teachers and scholars.
In addition to eminent faculty members, Yale research relies heavily on the presence of roughly 1200 Postdocs from various national and international origin working in the multiple laboratories in the sciences, social sciences, humanities, and professional schools of the university. The university progressively recognized this working force with the recent creation of the Office for Postdoctoral Affairs and the Yale Postdoctoral Association.
Notable alumni
Over its history, Yale has produced many distinguished alumni in a variety of fields, ranging from the public to private sector. According to 2020 data, around 71% of undergraduates join the workforce, while the next largest majority of 16.6% go on to attend graduate or professional schools. Yale graduates have been recipients of 252 Rhodes Scholarships, 123 Marshall Scholarships, 67 Truman Scholarships, 21 Churchill Scholarships, and 9 Mitchell Scholarships. The university is also the second largest producer of Fulbright Scholars, with a total of 1,199 in its history and has produced 89 MacArthur Fellows. The U.S. Department of State Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs ranked Yale fifth among research institutions producing the most 2020–2021 Fulbright Scholars. Additionally, 31 living billionaires are Yale alumni.
At Yale, one of the most popular undergraduate majors among Juniors and Seniors is political science, with many students going on to serve careers in government and politics. Former presidents who attended Yale for undergrad include William Howard Taft, George H. W. Bush, and George W. Bush while former presidents Gerald Ford and Bill Clinton attended Yale Law School. Former vice-president and influential antebellum era politician John C. Calhoun also graduated from Yale. Former world leaders include Italian prime minister Mario Monti, Turkish prime minister Tansu Çiller, Mexican president Ernesto Zedillo, German president Karl Carstens, Philippine president José Paciano Laurel, Latvian president Valdis Zatlers, Taiwanese premier Jiang Yi-huah, and Malawian president Peter Mutharika, among others. Prominent royals who graduated are Crown Princess Victoria of Sweden, and Olympia Bonaparte, Princess Napoléon.
Yale alumni have had considerable presence in U.S. government in all three branches. On the U.S. Supreme Court, 19 justices have been Yale alumni, including current Associate Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas, and Brett Kavanaugh. Numerous Yale alumni have been U.S. Senators, including current Senators Michael Bennet, Richard Blumenthal, Cory Booker, Sherrod Brown, Chris Coons, Amy Klobuchar, Ben Sasse, and Sheldon Whitehouse. Current and former cabinet members include Secretaries of State John Kerry, Hillary Clinton, Cyrus Vance, and Dean Acheson; U.S. Secretaries of the Treasury Oliver Wolcott, Robert Rubin, Nicholas F. Brady, Steven Mnuchin, and Janet Yellen; U.S. Attorneys General Nicholas Katzenbach, John Ashcroft, and Edward H. Levi; and many others. Peace Corps founder and American diplomat Sargent Shriver and public official and urban planner Robert Moses are Yale alumni.
Yale has produced numerous award-winning authors and influential writers, like Nobel Prize in Literature laureate Sinclair Lewis and Pulitzer Prize winners Stephen Vincent Benét, Thornton Wilder, Doug Wright, and David McCullough. Academy Award winning actors, actresses, and directors include Jodie Foster, Paul Newman, Meryl Streep, Elia Kazan, George Roy Hill, Lupita Nyong’o, Oliver Stone, and Frances McDormand. Alumni from Yale have also made notable contributions to both music and the arts. Leading American composer from the 20th century Charles Ives, Broadway composer Cole Porter, Grammy award winner David Lang, and award-winning jazz pianist and composer Vijay Iyer all hail from Yale. Hugo Boss Prize winner Matthew Barney, famed American sculptor Richard Serra, President Barack Obama presidential portrait painter Kehinde Wiley, MacArthur Fellow and contemporary artist Sarah Sze, Pulitzer Prize winning cartoonist Garry Trudeau, and National Medal of Arts photorealist painter Chuck Close all graduated from Yale. Additional alumni include architect and Presidential Medal of Freedom winner Maya Lin, Pritzker Prize winner Norman Foster, and Gateway Arch designer Eero Saarinen. Journalists and pundits include Dick Cavett, Chris Cuomo, Anderson Cooper, William F. Buckley, Jr., and Fareed Zakaria.
In business, Yale has had numerous alumni and former students go on to become founders of influential business, like William Boeing (Boeing, United Airlines), Briton Hadden and Henry Luce (Time Magazine), Stephen A. Schwarzman (Blackstone Group), Frederick W. Smith (FedEx), Juan Trippe (Pan Am), Harold Stanley (Morgan Stanley), Bing Gordon (Electronic Arts), and Ben Silbermann (Pinterest). Other business people from Yale include former chairman and CEO of Sears Holdings Edward Lampert, former Time Warner president Jeffrey Bewkes, former PepsiCo chairperson and CEO Indra Nooyi, sports agent Donald Dell, and investor/philanthropist Sir John Templeton,
Yale alumni distinguished in academia include literary critic and historian Henry Louis Gates, economists Irving Fischer, Mahbub ul Haq, and Nobel Prize laureate Paul Krugman; Nobel Prize in Physics laureates Ernest Lawrence and Murray Gell-Mann; Fields Medalist John G. Thompson; Human Genome Project leader and National Institutes of Health director Francis S. Collins; brain surgery pioneer Harvey Cushing; pioneering computer scientist Grace Hopper; influential mathematician and chemist Josiah Willard Gibbs; National Women’s Hall of Fame inductee and biochemist Florence B. Seibert; Turing Award recipient Ron Rivest; inventors Samuel F.B. Morse and Eli Whitney; Nobel Prize in Chemistry laureate John B. Goodenough; lexicographer Noah Webster; and theologians Jonathan Edwards and Reinhold Niebuhr.
In the sporting arena, Yale alumni include baseball players Ron Darling and Craig Breslow and baseball executives Theo Epstein and George Weiss; football players Calvin Hill, Gary Fenick, Amos Alonzo Stagg, and “the Father of American Football” Walter Camp; ice hockey players Chris Higgins and Olympian Helen Resor; Olympic figure skaters Sarah Hughes and Nathan Chen; nine-time U.S. Squash men’s champion Julian Illingworth; Olympic swimmer Don Schollander; Olympic rowers Josh West and Rusty Wailes; Olympic sailor Stuart McNay; Olympic runner Frank Shorter; and others.
SDSS Reflecting Ritchey–Chrétien Telescope at Apache Point Observatory, near Sunspot NM, Altitude 2,788 meters (9,147 ft). 
Apache Point Observatory near Sunspot, New Mexico Altitude 2,788 meters (9,147 ft). 
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